Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America

Part introspective soul searching, part cultural analysis, Tribal tackles the controversies plaguing college athletics, tracing the dubious historical underpinnings of Americans’ most popular sport, offering a visceral and often funny analysis of its tribal thrills and deep contradictions at the heart of college football.

Florida State’s football team is always in the headlines, producing Heisman Trophy candidates, winning championships, and, at the same time, dealing with federal investigations into corruption and rape. Same as many big time collegiate sports programs. Seems no matter how the team transgresses off the field, if they excel on the field, everyone forgives them. Writer, professor and conflicted Seminole Diane Roberts looks at the problems plaguing her campus in Tallahassee, examining them within the context of college football in the South, its significance in American life, and explores how the game shapes our culture.

How can an intelligent, cultivated woman love a sport so rife with corruption, sexism, and brutality?

• A Conflicted Fan’s Memoir: Step inside the mind of a writer and professor who spends her fall Saturdays celebrating the rituals of her tribe—even when she knows better.
• Incisive Cultural Analysis: Go beyond the headlines to understand why college football has become a quasi-religious, multi-billion-dollar business that shapes American life.
• Scandals and Corruption: An unflinching look at the controversies plaguing Florida State, from federal investigations to the Jameis Winston rape allegation, set in the context of a broken NCAA system.
• Tribalism and Identity: Explore how team allegiance becomes a creed, a source of identity that divides the world into Us and Them, from the FSU-Florida rivalry to the heart of the SEC.

One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football.

Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault.

In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.

“A gifted writer, [Roberts] is rightly outraged by the sport and her school’s links with some of the uglier aspects of American life, but she truly adores the ‘Noles. Most readers will share her ambivalence while thoroughly enjoying her take on a troubled sport.” - Booklist (starred review)

“…a penetrating examination of how and why football has infiltrated our system of higher education…” - Salon

“People who have decided to read one book having to do with college football should choose Tribal. Roberts presents the attractions of the game as well as the recognition that college football as practiced at Florida State and places like it is indefensible-part ‘beloved tradition,’ part ‘corporate enterprise.” - Boston Globe

“[Tribal] affords an explanation of one of the most profound puzzles of today’s college-sports scene: why the NCAA colossus has not only secured the American psyche in a stranglehold but continues to tighten its grip.” - BookForum

“Those experiences were no doubt the germ of Tribal which exudes Roberts’ satirical Southern sensibility and way of wrapping hard truths in a droll, frequently bawdy and baroque kind of humor that can combine TMZ tabloid shock and Faulknerian literary awe in the same paragraph.” - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Diane Roberts is a wonder. She’s a surpassingly insightful writer and is as funny as a stand-up comic. Her book Tribal, on college football and far more, is a sui generis masterpiece.” - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“Tribal is a lover’s quarrel with college football so raucous, so entertainingly appalled, and so wise that it goes down as easily as a shot of bourbon from a smuggled flask on a Saturday afternoon in the fall.” - Will Blythe, New York Times bestselling author of To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever

“In Diane Roberts’s deft hands, football is never just a game-it’s a mirror of American attitudes toward gender, class, and especially race. Roberts is a brilliant cultural critic and a dream of a writer, and Tribal is not only timely-it’s necessary reading.” - Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove

“Diane Roberts is irresistible, the Molly Ivins of Florida, and Tribal is essential to understanding the dynamics of American culture. Tribal isn’t just a good book, it’s a great one-and hilarious to boot.” - Bob Shacochis, National Book Award-winning author of Easy in the Islands