All of the pearl clutching about “PAC stabbers” and “defectors” is a little silly to me. There’s no moral dimension here. Nobody “owes” Wyoming anything, and the schools left behind in modern college athletics aren’t being cheated so much as losing a market competition they were never positioned to win.
That doesn’t mean everything inside Wyoming has been handled well...it clearly hasn’t. Administrative mistakes, complacency, and a failure to adapt have absolutely made a difficult situation worse. But even if UW had been run far more effectively over the last 20+ years, the broader structural forces pushing schools like Wyoming toward the margins would still exist.
We may not like that reality, but it is reality. Forces far outside the borders of Wyoming now have more influence over the fate of UW athletics than anything happening inside the state.
College athletics has been a “what can you get away with?” environment for a long time. Schools maneuver for money, exposure, recruiting access, and survival. CSU didn’t betray some sacred covenant....they acted in what they believed was their institutional self-interest. Do not kid yourself....Wyoming would have done the exact same thing if the roles were reversed.
The uncomfortable truth is that UW simply doesn’t bring much leverage to the table right now. Historically, the one way programs like Wyoming could overcome structural disadvantages was through sustained competitive excellence and stability inside an amateur model that still allowed room for disruption (The Boise State pathway). But the sport has moved further and further toward a professionalized system where structural advantages compound instead of flatten out.
That doesn’t mean UW should give up. But I think people are misdiagnosing the problem if they think this came down to loyalty, betrayal, or CSU being uniquely immoral.
