The Best New College Football Books To Read In 2025

From an award-winning, bestselling author, a year inside Ivy League Football, unveiling the heart and soul of college football’s oldest teams as they compete amidst a rapidly changing collegiate sports world. The history of the Ivy League dates back to 1869 when Princeton played the first college football game against Rutgers. The Ancient Eight explores Ivy League football today. To play in the NFL, one must maintain the highest academic standards and be a great football player. The rivalries are as intense, as are the strict rules–but there is also a genuine purity n the Ivy League.

Through intimate interviews with players, coaches, and key figures, Feinstein uncovers the unique culture that defines football on the Ivy League gridiron, offering unparalleled access to the remarkable coaching staffs and student-athletes who balance their academic ambitions with their passion for the game. On the field, inside the locker room, and around campus, The Ancient Eight reveals the phenomenal stories of the young men who play in today’s Ivy League and those who coach them.

In this book, Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America’s favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players from some of the country’s most prominent college football teams, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation.

Through the stories of those who lived it, the authors examine the ways in which college football must be understood as a site of harm, revealing how players are systematically denied the economic value they produce for universities and offered only a devalued education in return. By illuminating the plantation dynamics that make college football a particularly racialized form of exploitation, the book makes legible the forms of physical sacrifice that are required, the ultimate cost in health and well-being, and the coercion that drives players into the sport and compels them to endure such abusive conditions.

Update: See a Free Preview and Table of Contents ('Read Sample' button under product images). 30 Days to Play College Football: Recruiting GuidebookTransform your son’s football dreams into reality with our ultimate recruiting guide. As a parent, you understand how crucial it is to seize every opportunity for your son to go to college and play football. His dream of playing college football depends on the decisions and actions taken today. Our meticulously crafted recruiting book is your secret weapon to maximizing this once-in-a-lifetime chance.

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