Episode 31: Dave Newport, Director, U of Colorado Environmental Center
The University of Colorado Buffaloes, often a punching bag over the last two decades, are THE story of the brand new college football season, thanks to the sizzle of new coach Deion ‘Prime’ Sanders and his bravado, and the substance, thanks to Saturday’s shocking 45-42 upset at TCU.
Colorado is also in the middle of the year’s biggest off-field college sports story: the dissolution of the venerable Pac-12, the 100+ year-old ‘Conference of Champions’. A massive influx of TV dollars into rival leagues like the Big Ten (starting in ’24-’25, the new home for Pac-12 stalwarts Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington) and Big-12 (new home to Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah), combined with poor management on the part of the Pac-12, led to its demise, seemingly overnight.
The conference’s disappearance has two significant, if underreported environmental consequences:
Significant increases in travel-related carbon emissions.
The end of Pac-12 Team Green, the most forward-acting environmental initiative in college athletics history.
With all of this as backdrop, this is the perfect time to have Dave Newport on GreenSportsPod. Dave, the long-time director of the CU Environmental Center, one of the early leaders of the Green-Sports movement, and a founding father of Pac-12 Team Green, talks about the tectonic shifts in college sports, their environmental and psychic impacts, and more.
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Dave Newport (Photo credit: University of Colorado-Boulder)
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