Like Ohio State vs. Michigan, Harvard vs. Yale, Auburn vs. ‘Bama, and USC vs. UCLA, Arizona vs. Arizona State is one of the best rivalries in college sports. The Sundevils and Wildcats play each other this weekend. But in the mean time, some pranksters from ASU went incognito down in Tucson to make University of Arizona students look like idiots.
Here’s the sparknotes: They made up a fake ballot proposition called “Proposition 200” that would “give” the University of Arizona “back” to Mexico, which UA kids believed. They also said “Prop 200” would allow Mexican citizens pay in-state tuition at UA. They pranked so many people signing their ballot initiative that the University of Arizona student newspaper even ran a story about it, which they then took down and retracted:
Sports Illustrated’s Campus Rush actually talked to the people behind the prank:
Ben Kaufman: Oh, man, a lot. So there’s a joke at Arizona State — it’s a pretty multigenerational joke — that like we just want to give U of A back to Mexico and just get rid of them. So it came about like, ‘If we were to do that, how would we do that legally?’ Well, you can do anything with a proposition, and then Prop 200, we actually called it that because that was the proposition that Arizona voted on that changed Arizona State College to Arizona State University and U of A was a big opponent of it. So it was a joke within a joke that we got U of A students to vote yes on 200 and they’re giving their school back to Mexico, so it’s a big double whammy.
CR: So how many U of A students did you actually fool?
BK: Let’s see, we handed out about 200 of those pamphlets and we got about 40 student and faculty signatures and then for the poll, we got like 33, 34 students. So for a slow Wednesday on campus, it wasn’t bad.
CR: And you made the sacrifice of actually going to Tucson.
BK: You have no idea how hard it is to breathe that air. We basically just got up super early and drove down there. We pretended to be students for a couple of hours, then we left and I made it back in time for my 4 p.m. class.
Troll status officially unlocked. Nice job, ASU.