Gridiron Geopolitics: How East Carolina Football Quietly Explains the Collapsing World Order
East Carolina University’s football team, the Pirates, usually sails under the radar of the global sports-industrial complex—an oddly comforting fact in a world where footballers in the Persian Gulf now command salaries pegged to sovereign-wealth-fund spreadsheets and the price of Brent crude. Yet every autumn, in a modest 50,000-seat stadium carved out of tobacco-scented North…