A&M Students Claim Athletic Department Undermining White-Out Relief Effort

The 6-week long effort to ’white-out’ the Texas A&M- Baylor game might be getting a big red light from Athletic Director Bill Byrne.

In his ’Wednesday Weekly’ blog he wrote, ” When the television cameras turn on, there is no better sight than the sea of maroon coming from the 12th Man. We encourage fans to always wear maroon, because maroon is Texas A&M.”

The suggestion has infuriated some of the students in the Aggie Wildfire Relief group who spearheaded the relief effort. Members say they approached the university over a month ago with the idea and were told the university would not interfere with their efforts.

“What we do is very consistent with what we have done with other efforts, and we try to help them understand what the goal is, and then we walk them through the process and navigate them and direct them to various resources on campus so they can accomplish their goal,” said Bill Stackman, Director of Student Activities with Texas A&M University.

Byrne’s statement is not consistent with their goal according to some, but several students say it doesn’t matter.

“I think as the athletic director he has the right to say whatever he wants, but I mean I think the student body is still going to wear white because they have been representing it all over the place, especially Facebook,” said Emily Smith, a Texas A&M University student.

Student body president Jeff Pickering says maroon-outs are a student body effort, and this is no different.

“This is totally a student body effort. I think when our students wake up on Saturday morning for this historic last game against Baylor, kind of a Battle of the Brazos, we’ll be wearing white and waving maroon to stand for our fellow Texans,” Pickering said.

Pickering says more than 1,000 T-shirts and maroon towels have been sold every day.