Ep. 276: The death of sports?

But we wanted to start this discussion about the death of college sports with this moment because there's so much here.

As Amira has made clear in previous episodes, the University of Texas is at the center of a radical right wing agenda to decimate the actual education happening on campus.

While the school clings to sports, especially football, as a way to sell the school and its soul.

Amira, will you please tell us a little bit about what you saw on campus in the lead up to this game? This like genuinely surprised me.

Yeah, for sure.

It's so interesting.

We're here in the third or fourth week of the semester at the University of Texas at Austin dealing with being under siege from the state government per usual.

But then football rolls to town, college game day comes into town, and it's like a cover for all of the events.

chaos is happening.

But this week, leading up to College Came Day being here, we had other brands also descending on campus that is so fascinating to me.

So we had a coach pop up that provided...

Like

purses.

Like expensive purses.

Yeah.

It had a huge, like, miniature coach perch that people were taking pictures of.

And they had custom longhorn, like, leather bookmarks.

They had a book nook so you could get a book to put in your coach purse, question mark.

And they also had a board so you could write down your goals for the semester.

Sure.

And then just two days before the game, they announced a partnership with Nike Skims.

Nike Skims did a pop-up on campus, too, with lots of...

Burnt Orange, Nike Skims apparel.

That was also a big pop up on Speedway with like a mini thing that you could buy, but lots of free giveaways like custom designed espressos.

Some of these things make no sense to me.