Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America

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

Florida State’s football team is always in the headlines, producing Heisman Trophy candidates and winning championships while dealing with federal investigations into corruption and rape. Like many big-time collegiate sports programs, it seems that if they excel on the field, all is forgiven. Writer, professor, and conflicted Seminole Diane Roberts examines the problems on her own campus in Tallahassee, placing them within the larger context of college football history and its significance in American life, and explores how the game shapes our Southern culture.

How can a game so rife with corruption and controversy still hold the American South captive?

• Cultural Analysis: An unflinching and often hilarious look at the quasi-religious fervor of college football from the perspective of a writer, professor, and deeply conflicted Florida State Seminole fan.
• NCAA Controversies: A deep dive into the scandals plaguing major programs, using Florida State’s high-profile troubles with corruption, academic fraud, and violence as a compelling case study.
• Tribalism in Sports: An exploration of the rituals, rivalries, and identities that turn Saturdays in the fall into a consecrated battleground where you are either with us or against us.
• Sports History: A look at the game’s dubious origins, tracing a line from brutal medieval contests to the modern game’s complicated role in the politics of race, gender, and culture in America.

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 most elite college football schools in the country. 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 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, 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