North Dakota State

[PorkerPoke]

Leadership does matter. Look at Utard State and even with all the turmoil they have had they are still putting out successful teams.

The single biggest thing they did was take Stew Morril when CS-ewe didn’t appreciate what they had. All he did was put usu hoops on a Brandenburg type run and the admin there haven’t run the program into the ground.

They also have gone out and got football coaches who were able to get to .500 and peak at the top a couple of times. We took the QB they benched and got to 9 wins for the first time since 1996 because we were finally able to play some offense.

Under Burman we are like a house continually in need of a paint job but the approach is to try and touch up the really bad spots and call it good.

 

[307bball]

Leadership does matter. Look at Utard State and even with all the turmoil they have had they are still putting out successful teams.

The single biggest thing they did was take Stew Morril when CS-ewe didn’t appreciate what they had. All he did was put usu hoops on a Brandenburg type run and the admin there haven’t run the program into the ground.

They also have gone out and got football coaches who were able to get to .500 and peak at the top a couple of times. We took the QB they benched and got to 9 wins for the first time since 1996 because we were finally able to play some offense.

Under Burman we are like a house continually in need of a paint job but the approach is to try and touch up the really bad spots and call it good.

Leadership matters — of course it does. The question is how much leverage leadership actually has given the structural forces at play.

Utah State is a tough comparison because most of the macro factors that constrain Wyoming are either neutral or outright favorable for them. They sit in a faster-growing population base, have easier access to recruits and transfers, and benefit from being within the gravitational pull of the Wasatch Front rather than hundreds of miles from anything. That matters more now than it did 25–30 years ago.

Morrill was a great hire, no question — but that also happened at a time when basketball success was more portable and less resource-intensive than it is now. Today, sustaining that kind of run is dramatically harder, especially from a place with Wyoming’s geography and NIL realities.

Same thing in football: getting to .500 and spiking a good season here and there is still possible (we’ve seen that), but doing it consistently is where the headwinds show up. Utah State’s environment makes those peaks easier to reach and easier to maintain.

The frustration for me is that people talk past each other. Leadership can absolutely make things marginally better or worse — but pretending UW and USU are operating under the same constraints misses why “just hire better” hasn’t produced durable success here in decades.

I know I'm running afoul of the "you are just making excuses for Burman" crowd with this line of thinking...but I am certainly no fan of his.