Up until CSU got included in with BSU, SDSU, and Fresno in the latest conference re-shuffling, Wyoming fans could plausibly believe that performance on the gridiron could be our saving grace. We comforted ourselves by pointing out that UW has a much larger endowment than CSU, that nobody in Denver actually cares about them, and other less salient reasons. The sentiment seemed to be that as long as we dominated the lambs on the gridiron, Wyoming would be just fine...after all, all of the programs that jump to more competitive conferences are more competitive on the field right? As lists were endlessly generated that had no mention of Wyoming and mentioned (however tangentially) CSU as a possible candidate for "fill-in-the-blank" conference, Wyoming fans mocked the deluded ewe fans who thought they "deserved" to be in any conference that was better than whatever conference Wyoming is in.
The news that CSU was leaving Wyoming behind has laid bare the fallacy of all of that discussion. Was it about airport size? Media perception? Football success? DEI? It was all of it and none of it...It's like the stock market....perception matters. The fact that Wyoming's name was never ever mentioned (if it was, I missed it) in conference expansion candidate discussion was very telling. The roots of this situation are deep and layered....whatever has gone on in the last 10-15 or so years in Laramie has not helped us, but the fact is the foundations of this disaster for Wyoming collegiate athletics stretches back to Lee Moon's tenure. I don't know all of the causes...but a 10-2 top 25 Wyoming team got left out of bowl consideration in 1996...many, even many in national media, criticized that. They pointed out that if it were about excellence and rewarding excellence, Wyoming should have been bowl-bound. They were right...it's not about excellence. That was the evidence that the shift had already happened and we Wyomingites didn't notice it. Being good is good...but if you just have an audience, or, in the case of CSU, the possibility of an audience...people will write checks and invite you to the club. College football is a private club....It is a media driven phenomenon. Wyoming will always settle near the bottom of that game. When it comes to football...southern smaller schools now pretty much would dominate Wyoming in terms of eyeballs and in ability to win games. Who's fault is all of this? It's not an individual. Our state, that many of us were raised in and are all fiercely loyal to is collectively to blame. If we want Wyoming to look like it did when we were little tykes and we also want UW athletics to be above the likes of NDAK, Mont, Mont St...we are desiring incompatible things. This is deeper than athletics...athletics is just a canary in the modern socio-economic coal mine.
