As a fan, you experience the excitement, agony, thrill and pain of college football through TV or in person at a stadium. But it’s what you don’t see or feel is what Tracie Canada wants you to experience through her new book, Tackling the Everyday.
The book is a ten-year journey of watching and writing, Canada’s favorite “complementary activities.”
But, Canada is not a journalist or sports management professor.
She’s an anthropologist and focuses on human behavior and the study of the human experience. So while some watch college football to cheer on their favorite team or player, or to see how their bets are progressing, Canada is interested in the culture of college football and the behaviors within the sport, particularly as it relates to Black players.
The casual fan might not understand her path of coverage, which is why the organization of her book was so crucial for her.
“I wanted to tell a cohesive story, and I thought that the way in for people, and to get them on board with the arguments that I’m trying to make, is to hook them with something that’s relatable and something that they know,” she told me during our interview. “And to me, that is this idea of the team. The team and the family.
“These are the two dynamics that are always brought up.”
Even in today’s era of college sports, where NIL and, even more recently, the fact that college athletes can now be paid directly by the school thanks to the NCAA House Settlement, team and family are still dominant factors.
And from the way Tracie explores college football, the team and family can be the same.
“It’s not just the players, it’s also the coaches,” said Canada. “It’s also the strength and conditioning coaches, it’s also the nutrition staff, it’s also the sports medicine people.”
So it’s easy to see how important the team/family dynamic is once you finally recognize it.
But for Black players, it’s even more significant, and that’s why Canada focused on the individual player for at the end of the day, the player is the one who gets hurt, gets discussed in the media, experiences love and hate from fans and shoulders the physical and emotional wear and tear of college football.
“They’re members of a team, they are individuals,” she said. “They are sons, they are friends, they are brothers, they are students, they are all of these things happening at the same time.”
Canada explores the journey Black players take in college football, with a focus on HBCU and FBS players.
And while the money, exposure, crowds, money, resources and general experience differ greatly, the general physical experience of Black players essentially does not.
It’s something she sets up in the book’s introduction.
Black Players and Numbers
“It’s impossible to understand the range of Black players’ experience without contextualizing the elaborate and unique (and extractive) system that organizes college football, specifically, and college sports generally.” (page 8)
Understanding the Black player is the core focus of the book; not as a player, stat or potential draft pick, but rather through what they experience during their college football journey.
The greatest aspect of Tracie’s book is that it makes you look and watch college football differently.
Her most interesting take is her critical exploration into the concept of numbers and how athletes become defined and identified by them.
From their jersey and GPA to the stats generated by athletes at the NFL Combine and the salaries they are paid, numbers are used to value a player instead of who the player is as a person.
This in turn makes players protective of their number, which requires new/younger players to ask past superstars for permission to wear their number.
In some cases, a number symbolizes something of personal importance for athletes. Canada mentions how some players pick a number because it was their mother’s birth year, a conscious choice that establishes another point of connection between the player and their family.
In Tackling the Everyday, Canada identified key themes and woven them throughout in a manner that reiterates her points without making them redundant or repetitive.
These concepts include numbers, dehumanization, genealogy, systems and of course, race.
“How is that number manipulated by the system in which they’re participating,” she said. “What then happens when all you’re doing is calling somebody by their number?”
Jersey numbers also play a part in genealogically you think about who wore the number before you and who will wear it after you, illustrating the deep intimate and consistent connection that exists between players and numbers.
The Systems
Canada also looks at how players journey through systems while in college.
“Players are navigating multiple systems. They’re navigating the academic side of the university, the athletic side and the real world outside of sport…and they’re also walking through all these spaces all of the time, every day, throughout the day.”
These systems cause players to be regarded a certain way because of the bodies that are required, and that’s particularly true for Black players.
“You need a particular body that is built up in a particular way to play football because of the violence that’s inherent in it,” said Canada. “But you take that same Black person that is playing football, and you take him outside of the helmet and you put him in street clothes so that he’s sitting in the classroom or you put him in street clothes so that he’s walking down the street and that same body is going to be perceived in a completely different way because of the way that anti-Blackness is written into the systems that we walk through.”
This leads us into discussions of stereotypes and race, which Black athletes, no matter their fame, ultimately can’t avoid.
“What does it mean to live in a Black body? It means to live in a body that is able to produce, that can be run down, that can take a lot, that can withstand a particular physical toll,” she said regarding Black bodies and connections to plantation slavery. “These are all assumptions of a Black body and the functionality of a Black body.
“The assumption is that you are not the same, and we can do this to you and you will survive because you are different.”
“These are the dynamics that are at play, whether or not you see them, whether or not people are talking about them, he’s up against these historical notions of what it means to be a Black man and the ideas of the level of harm that your body can withstand.”
And being able to withstand the demands of college football leads players to the weight room, which is where Canada finds another interesting dynamic.
“The weight room is about building bodies, but it’s also a form of control exerted over Black athletes by coaches. It’s where they want to control your life…the number of reps, the amount of food they want you to consume. It’s all dictated and measured, and it starts in the weight room.”
Through Tackling the Everyday, Canada gives readers new angles to view the sport, and after reading her book, you will definitely watch it differently.
“I want people to think about something that they think that they know really well, and I hope they think about it a little differently,” she told me.
After reading her book, I can promise you that you will develop an entirely new perspective on college football and the Black players who play it.
