A player’s foreseeable death raises existential questions for college football

If the purpose of universities is to cultivate the mind, it is nearly impossible to deny that football, by degrading the brain, is antithetical to the process

“It is clearly the duty of the colleges which have permitted these monstrous evils to grow up and become intense to purge themselves of such immoralities … Intercollegiate and interscholastic football ought to be prohibited until a reasonable game has been formulated.”

Those were the words of Harvard University president Charles W Eliot in 1906, a year after three college players died playing football, part of a spate of deaths that led many universities to abandon the sport and President Roosevelt to call for safety reforms in the game he loved. Sadly, Eliot’s words resonate as if written today: on 29 November, Alabama A&M linebacker Medrick Burnett Jr died from a head injury he had suffered in a game the previous month. He was just twenty years old.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, November 2024) and co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.