By Will Wieters
By the time the day settled in, Memorial Gym felt different.
It was the last Vanderbilt home week of the season, which meant there was already a little extra emotion hanging in the air. It was loud. It was crowded. It was a little sentimental in the way college sports can be when everyone in the building knows a chapter is closing, even if nobody is quite ready to say it out loud. Then, Squishmallows arrived in the middle of all of it.
Vanderbilt men beat Georgia 88-80. The women handled Alabama 85-60. The university was in the middle of a genuinely exciting season, and this weekend felt like a peak.
But what made the activation land was not only that it was colorful or different or easy to post about. It was that it tapped into something softer and a little more personal: community, nostalgia, and the realization that college is a journey with an end.
On paper, Vanderbilt and Squishmallows are not the most obvious pair. One is a globally respected university in the SEC. The other is a plush brand and lifestyle sensation built on softness, collectability, and a kind of affectionate craze. But sitting there that weekend, the parallel was hard to miss. Squishmallows trades in comfort, joy, and a return to something childlike. Vanderbilt, especially at moments like this, can feel oddly similar. It’s a place full of very serious people doing very serious things, but it’s also a place where community still matters, where traditions still matter, where people still want a reason to gather around something a little wholesome.
That emotional fit was obvious on game day, but the story started much earlier, in the sort of conversation that only sounds inevitable after the fact.
Mario Avila, who teaches strategy and entrepreneurship at Owen, described the whole thing through the lens he brings into the classroom.
“You have to show up. Be intentional. Go deep with your networks. And make sure you’re always adding value,” Mario explained. For him, entrepreneurship is not just about launching a company. It’s about staying alert long enough to notice when different worlds might actually belong together.
That’s more or less how this collaboration began.
Mario first met Jeremy Padawer, MBA’01 and Chief Brand Officer for Jazwares, through Vanderbilt connections and stayed in touch. Later, at a Dare to Grow event in L.A., he found himself listening to both Padawer and Vice Chancellor for Vanderbilt Athletics Candice Storey Lee and started connecting dots.
“A light bulb hit,” he said.
Squishmallows had the cultural pull. Vanderbilt Athletics had the stage. The question was whether somebody was willing to chase the connection instead of letting it pass by.
The first version of the idea was bigger and stranger. Mario started thinking about sponsor-driven sports spectacles and wondered why Vanderbilt could not have something of its own. Coming off the Pop-Tarts Bowl moment, his mind went to a Squishmallow Bowl. He texted Padawer. Padawer was in. Vanderbilt Athletics was intrigued. Then reality arrived. Bowls take years to plan. Assets get tied up. The logistics are brutal. A weaker idea probably would have died there. This one got more interesting instead.
Rather than forcing the original concept, the project pivoted toward what Vanderbilt could actually control: Memorial Gym, basketball, men and women, a February weekend that could feel like a takeover rather than a sponsorship. That shift says a lot about why the collaboration happened at all. It was creative, yes, but it was also nimble. It required people across athletics, licensing, legal, and the university to move quickly and trust one another enough to try something new. It also required students.
Vanderbilt MBA students Matt Crevoiserat, Cutler Klein, Nayab Liaqat, Jimmy Sexton, and Ryan Wood helped develop the idea and think through what it would take to bring the iconic collab to life.
Mario didn’t just want to talk about entrepreneurship in the abstract. He wanted students in the middle of it. He described the project as the place where theory hits practice.
“This is live, it is real, and it is impacting real players, real people.” The point was not to hand students a polished case study and ask what they would have done. The point was to put them in a situation where the answer actually mattered.
Padawer saw that immediately. When asked what stood out to him about the student work, he did not just praise the creativity. He praised the fact that they were willing to operate inside the real messiness of the work.
“They were almost like consultants in this process, but not just consultants,” he said. “They had to get involved with the tactical plan as well.”
In other words, the students were not only sketching a strategy deck from a safe distance. They were getting into the nuts and bolts of what it would take to make a billion-dollar brand show up correctly inside a college sports environment.
That trust piece came up again and again. At one point, after talking about the amount of real responsibility Vanderbilt students are often given, Padawer made the comparison explicit: “We trusted Mario’s students here and the team here with a billion dollar brand.” The students were not handling a fake classroom simulation. They were helping shape the early public logic of a real brand entering a new space.
Padawer also had a clear sense of why Vanderbilt made sense as the place to begin. “This is about bringing joy to the students and also introducing the concept of Squishmallows in college,” he said ahead of the big game. Vanderbilt gave the brand a campus that was open to experimentation, a leadership team willing to try something unusual, and a student body that did not need much help understanding why a plush brand might belong in their world.
There was something fitting about that. College can feel so relentlessly optimized. Everyone is recruiting for something, applying to something, building toward something. Squishmallows cuts against that just a little. It’s soft. It’s unserious in the best way. It makes people smile, remember the innocence of life they might have had in another time. Bringing that into Memorial on the last home weekend of the season gave the event a strange kind of emotional accuracy. It reflected something true about Vanderbilt life that does not always make it into the polished version. Beneath all the ambition, people still want comfort. They still want fun. They still want a reason to gather around something sweet.
Maybe that’s why the whole thing felt bigger than a collab. It captured a version of Vanderbilt that students already know but do not always know how to describe. A place where serious work and real experimentation can happen at the same time. A place where an MBA classroom can help shape a live brand launch. A place where administrators, alumni, faculty, and students can move quickly enough to turn an idea into reality. And, on a weekend like this, a place where community still wins.
By the end of the games, the answer was not really whether Squishmallows belonged at Vanderbilt. The answer was that it already did. The students proved that in the planning. Mario proved it in the way he connected the dots. Jeremy proved it in the trust he placed in Vanderbilt. The crowd proved it in real time. For a loud, nostalgic, unexpectedly wholesome couple of nights, the partnership felt less like a brand trying to enter college sports and more like a brand returning to a place it had always fit.
