OJust a few days after the 2024 College Football Playoff National Championship game, head coach Nick Saban announced his retirement from his position at the University of Alabama. Saban’s successor was announced the next day when the public learned that Kalen DeBoer of the University of Washington, fresh off a loss in the national title game, would lead the Crimson Tide.
As someone who follows college football, I was shocked by the announcement. After nearly two decades and six national championships in Tuscaloosa, Saban seemed like a rock-solid player. But as an anthropologist and ethnographer who specializes in the intersection of race and sports, I was more concerned about what the news meant for the players, given how the timing and secrecy surrounding these hires highlight a glaring discrepancy in the focus of the football on family.
I have spent the past decade learning how Black college football players deal with the exploitation, racism, and anti-Blackness that are fundamental to the college sports system. During this time, it has become clear to me how much football programs rely on the story of a “football family” to unite teammates.
Coaches and administrators theorize the team in this way to evoke the tonality of care and solidarity among individual players. They want to trust each other in practice and fight for each other on the field. Head coaches are key drivers of this message, especially during recruiting and pre-season play, because they need players to buy into a four-year dream.
This tactic has infiltrated football. Coaches will applaud the ways their players overcome difficulties and “come together as a team despite our differences,” as one position coach told me during an interview. When high school students commit to college programs, they often notice the family atmosphere they encounter during their visits. Social media posts include mottos that imbue the team with family language and morals, such as #famILLy from the University of Illinois, @NUFBFamily from Northwestern University and #BRADDAHHOOD from the University of Hawaii. Universities where I conducted research printed these slogans on T-shirts and wristbands for players to wear.
So much effort goes into convincing teammates that they belong to the college football family, and at some level the effort is almost always successful. The team is the most recognized representation of community and family in sports.
But the rhetoric is ultimately bogus.
Coaches leave out this family story when it no longer suits them. Of course, head coaches should be able to leave their posts for other jobs, or retire, as Saban did. But when they do, these decisions are often made quickly and without the players’ knowledge. Coaches move from one so-called family to another, leaving behind confused and blinded players, and it does so with very little regard for how those young men will cope in their absence. Coaches benefit from the family story and players are especially affected because they are promised a certain experience that can no longer be delivered.
A departing football coach is like the proverbial absent father.
This is a phenomenon I have seen up close. I was a professor at the University of Notre Dame in 2021 when players only learned of Brian Kelly’s move to Louisiana State University from news reports. This year, Mike Elko at Duke University, where I now teach, moved to Texas A&M late that evening after initially denying the hiring rumors.
Each time this happened, football players enrolled in my fall classes expressed their struggles and disappointment with the handling of these decisions. When it comes to the players, head coach transfers and recruitments matter because of the way they belie the football family discourse that coaches work so hard to perpetuate.
These head coaching changes are just one example of how the exploitative narrative of a caring football family collapses under pressure. Rapper and rhetorician A.D. Carson points to the dangers of uncritically buying into this football family, based on the ways Clemson University has tried to whitewash its history. Sports illustrated highlighted a group of 2020 players who were expected to prioritize their college football families during pandemic play over any concern for personal health, well-being and future prospects. In 2023, the Northwestern University The football coaching staff was embroiled in a hazing scandal that ultimately drew attention to physically violent, morally degrading and racially charged practices against members of their football family.
Sociologist Erin Hatton writes that the commodification of college athletes is increased by this constant emphasis on care and family, given the uncompensated labor of players throughout the system. Insights from my own research help explain why.
“With two years of production left, I’m just an X in their playbook,” one player told me after explaining his frustration with the way his coaches treated him. He had been so objectified by his coaches that he believed they saw him merely as a body to be used, merely a figure essential to the team’s successful execution of the playbook.
Players have constantly repeated to me that coaches have been treated apathetically and that playing skills are more important than well-being. This intense focus on players’ ability to perform on the field comes because football programs primarily want to win games, generate revenue and secure prestige, rather than focusing on what’s best for the athletes. Gridiron’s successes translate into financial profits. After all, this is a multi-billion dollar industry and the language of a football family is what allows players to engage. Coaches repeat the story as many times as necessary to convince players of its truth, but it is thrown away when they get a better opportunity at another college. The best the coaches can do is utter a few sad platitudes about the people they leave behind.
The 2023 season saw several major coaching vacancies and opportunities for sad farewells. Head football coaches leave their positions every year to pursue better opportunities, higher salaries and the potential for greater success: Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, Jim Harbaugh, who coached the University of Michigan to the national title last year, and UCLA’s Chip Kelly are just a few notable examples.
Whether they retired, were fired or left for other coaching positions, these head coaches cost their universities a significant amount of money through new contracts, acquisitions and settlements. a recent report estimates that football coaching and staff changes during the 2023 season will cost athletic departments at least $200 million. There is enough money to pay these coaches, even though players cannot earn a salary for participating in this so-called amateur system.
For these reasons I agree with the historian Robin D. G. Kelley: the football family metaphors are unfair. It has nothing to do with real love and care.
Stories that debunk the authenticity of the football family are contextualized in a landscape undergoing dramatic changes. With the introduction of name, image and likeness rules and changes made to the transfer portal in 2021, college athletes can now benefit from their identifying characteristics and will not be penalized for changing schools and teams before graduating. Additionally, the White House, the US Supreme CourtAnd the National Labor Relations Council have all been involved in conversations to discuss athletes’ rights, reconsider the employment status of athletes on college campuses, and challenge the“student-athlete.”
These changes attempt to slowly level the playing field for the benefit of athletes, redistributing the power of coaches and institutions. Early talk of the 72-year-old Saban’s retirement suggests these changes led to the seemingly sudden move and could encourage other, more traditional coaches to do the same soon. But players are far from equal to coaches in this equation. Although their athletic labor powers the entire system, college athletes do not have access to the same unlimited mobility, opportunities to bargain, status as employees and multimillion-dollar salaries offered to coaches.
With DeBoer at Alabama, the vacancy at Washington was filled by another well-known head coach who left his own position vacant. It’s impossible to predict how long this game of musical chairs will last, but as the coaches continue to shuffle around, the young people who come under their care are being let down. With around a hundred players on each team, thousands of players are affected every year by a form of labor mobility in which they cannot participate themselves. Despite their best efforts to portray themselves as the benign patriarchs of a happy family, head coaches are often the primary cause of its demise as they compete to sit at the head of another family table.
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Tracie Canada is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and affiliated with the Sports & Race Project at Duke University. Her research uses sports to theorize race, kinship, care, and gender, and she is currently completing a book project on the experiences of Black college football players.