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Nathan Kalman-Lamb Profile picture
Nathan Kalman-Lamb
@nkalamb
Happiness Vampire; Assist Prof of Soc @UNB; social theory + sport; words @guardian etc; @EndofSportPod; cis; he/him; preorder *The End of College Football*
May 23 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
At PSU, the 🏈 coach and AD allegedly pressured medics to help them take back a scholarship from a player who had just made an attempt on his life.

We argue for @newrepublic that’s an e.g. of the medical conflict of interest that saturates the sport.

newrepublic.com/article/181883…
Image Based on interviews we conducted with former football players in the P5 conferences for our forthcoming book *The End of College Football,* the experience of that unnamed Penn State player is more the rule than exception when it comes to the treatment and care of these athletes. Image
Feb 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The NFL uses a standard much higher than typical for dementia in adjudicating whether players can get access to the concussion settlement. This means that more than half of claims have been denied, even 300+ diagnoses by the settlement’s own doctors. This has saved the NFL $700M.

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Image At least 14 players have been denied compensation and care by the concussion settlement only to die and subsequently be diagnosed with CTE. Image
Jun 21, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The discursive project of fascism is to convince you that that power dynamics are upside-down. Dominant groups and people are ‘oppressed.’ Marginalized people are in fact dominant ‘oppressors.’

The beneficiaries are the elite of the capitalist class. Image The fascist project (MAGA) is seductive because it diagnoses real problems. People are suffering from unaffordable housing, inaccessible health care, rising cost of living but stagnant or declining wages. Fascism correctly acknowledges this privation and immiseration.
Jun 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Researchers find that the combination of strength and frequency of head trauma in football dictates the probability of contracting CTE.

This means a typical DL who played six seasons has 109x the chance of getting CTE vs a youth player.

109.
nytimes.com/2023/06/20/spo… Image Since I focus on college football, I want to underline how damning the numbers are there. A college senior DL has a 16x higher chance of contracting CTE than a youth player.

At some positions (DL and OL especially) college football is an almost inevitable path to CTE. Image
Jun 20, 2023 • 8 tweets • 7 min read
For @nbmediacoop, I explain how New Brunswick has become the surprising frontline of a continent-wide legislative war vs. trans people, a form of political transphobia, that seems to always start with the question of participation in women’s/girls' sport.

nbmediacoop.org/2023/06/20/com… Image In the @premierbhiggs admin's now infamous revisions to educational Policy 713, the explicit protection for extracurricular participation "consistent with their gender identity” has been removed, in line with anti-trans participation in sport legislation in 22 US states.
Jun 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
the vaccine-deniers are gloating because they did exactly what they were warned not to do if we wanted the vaccines to continue to be efficacious and now lo and behold that has come to pass congratulations on making us all vulnerable to covid in perpetuity
May 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
imagine being an admitted newcomer to sociology of sport literature and then claiming that no lit exists connecting sport to the plantation and then gaslighting the person who politely queried that claim

tenure must be nice I’d like to see them say that to the faces of Harry Edwards and Ben Carrington and Billy Hawkins
Oct 6, 2022 • 16 tweets • 8 min read
“I was called [the N-word] countless times in my DMs, was told to ‘go to my ancestral hut in the jungle’ and a bunch of other wild shit.” - Seth Towns (@219setty)

We talked to college athletes about fans, racism, and the BYU allegations.

theguardian.com/sport/2022/oct… Multiple players on the Duke women's volleyball team told us that during the game against BYU, they received threats, such as fans yelling that they should “watch [their] back.”

theguardian.com/sport/2022/oct…
Jul 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The Big Ten got some terrific PR yesterday, but excuse me if I’m skeptical at the idea they are enthused about the prospect of paying players.

I’ve been around universities a long time and I have *never* seen them willingly collaborate with labor.

cbssports.com/college-footba… If you look at what Warren actually said, there’s nothing whatsoever in there that gestures to real material change in the political economy of the conference.
Jul 23, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
No one is more interested in seeing campus athletic worker unions than I am.

Unfortunately, that's not what we're talking about here.

Unions are effective when antagonistic, leveraging solidarity for power. The conferences/unis aren't going to cede power via congenial dialogue. For more, please see this thorough reporting from @DanMurphyESPN. Advisory committees are not the answer, although they will assuredly generate some good PR for these universities.

espn.com/college-footba…
Jul 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
…okay then I think we should probably read the news in the context of this tweet.
Jul 21, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"We need urgent action now to stop the toxic abuse in the sport."

508 Canadian gymnasts call for independent investigation of Gymnastics Canada and immediate suspension of GymCan funding. "GymCan and Sport Canada have had knowledge of, and the opportunity to act on, suspected systemic abuse in gymnastics for at least two years and have done nothing, allowing abuse to continue against Canadian child athletes without intervention."

globalathlete.org/our-word/canad…
Jul 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Kirby Smart, yesterday, crowed that his players earned $3M *total* from NIL (i.e. not from Georgia).

Georgia football pulls in more that $134M/year.

The coach earns his salary because the players are denied theirs. *by "earns" I mean "receives in return for his service as exploiter-in-chief"
Jul 20, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Let me get this straight: New Brunswick has a $900M healthcare surplus over the last two years and the lowest per patient/per capita expenditure in the country? During a pandemic?

That's a criminal misallocation of public resources. "Instead of improved funding, Higgs wants to apply statistics and force hospitals to improve their metrics."

This is the US-model, now almost universally understood (including among Americans!) to undermine quality of care.

nbmediacoop.org/2022/07/19/pre…
Jul 1, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
This is how @SInow illustrated their NIL story today, because apparently it's greedy af for campus athletic workers to have the same basic rights as other people. Image Campus athletic workers continue to be denied a basic wage by their employers, but go off Sports Illustrated. Image