Flag Faux Pas? A&M Says No

By Rose Cahalan in Blog on October 3, 2011 at 3:59 pm | 8 Comments

A Getty Images photo on ESPN.com from Texas A&M’s Oct. 1 football game versus Arkansas shows the A&M Corps of Cadets displaying a Chilean flag during the singing of the U. S. national anthem.

Eagle-eyed readers on Reddit are poking fun at A&M for the photo, arguing that the Aggies must have mixed up the Chilean and Texan flags. Some commenters suggested that the cadets may have displayed the flag in honor of Gregory Hall, a former cadet who assisted in the Chilean miner rescue about a year ago.

The two flags do look very similar, with one big difference: where Chile’s flag has a blue square in the top left, the Texas flag has a blue column from top to bottom.

So was it a mistake? A&M says it wasn’t.

“The cadet who displayed the flag is from Chile,” said Corps of Cadets media relations coordinator Annette Walker. She did not identify the cadet.

Internet pranksters have also switched the Texas flag out for the Chilean one on Texas’ Wikipedia page. We hope that there aren’t any schoolchildren writing reports on the flag of Texas at this moment.

Note: the Wikipedia flag has now been fixed.

Note: an astute reader has pointed out that the photo on ESPN.com is by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images.

Chilean flag photo (top) from Flickr Creative Commons, dukepowers; Texas flag (right) from brianlromig

Tags: a&m, chile, flags, texas