I was wrong

[307bball]

Hindsight is always perfect so this should be taken with a giant grain of salt.

I think Burman should have fired Craig Bohl after 2018...let me explain.

Just need to get this out at the top: I have immense respect for Craig Bohl. I think he's a good man and wore the UW colors well. He built a developmental program with toughness, team work, hard work and grit that nobody took for granted.

Now, 2018 was the start of an unremarkable stretch for the cowboys. Wyoming finished 3rd or 4th on our division (even further down in overall MWC rankings) for the rest of Craig Bohl's tenure. Even 2023, despite winning the most games in Laramie since '96, was only good enough for a 4th place conference finish. By 2018, some fans were calling for Bohl's replacement because they saw that the ceiling for Bohl was the top of the middle of the conference unless he was able to get a lot more talent to come to Laramie. I actually agree with that assessment of what Bohl could accomplish but I disagreed that Burman should look for his replacement. I was wrong. I argued (correctly) that Bohl was a good coach that holds his players accountable and that the days of being at the bottom of the conference were finally behind us with Bohl at the helm. Great right?...not so much. It turns out that those years that we spent enjoying some border war victories and middling bowl appearances might be as good as Wyoming ever gets for the foreseeable future. I believe that it's as likely as not that if Burman had replaced Bohl for the 2019 season that it would not have gone well..but that was the time to strike.

I want to be careful here .... I don't think it was the obvious move at the time, if he had done that and it had not worked out...that would definitely have cost him his job and we would be in the same place today. The people that liked Bohl (most people) would have hated him for returning us to the basement, and the people that already hated him would have still hated him. I also still do not believe that Burman is the villian that he is painted as....it would have taken a singular vision to have seen all of this coming. We see now that those years (and the previous 20) spent mired in the middle of the MWC are costing us a place at a level of college football participation that Wyoming has always had.... My guess is that even Burman and the BOT and UW pres and everybody else sees that now. That was all that mattered. That was all that has ever mattered since the beginning of the end of college athletics at UW.

 

[flyfishwyo]

That's a very thoughtful take. In hindsight, it's hard to disagree. I'd say that the state of college football has changed so much in that timeframe that even if we had made a change I'm not sure it would have mattered.

All of the realignment that's happened since 2018 is about athletic budgets and perceived media markets. Winning isn't even figured into the equation when comes to desirability (see CSU for the last decade). I don't see a reasonable path to improving either budget or media market.

 

[TheRealUW]

Interesting thought experiment, but even had we brought in a huge name like Nick Saban and made a college football playoff or two, I don't think it actually changes where we are at now with the shifting college football landscape.

College football has accelerated down the for-profit business model over the last decade. That was always going to have disastrous repercussion for Wyoming athletics. Conferences are looking for teams that help them scale their business of college football. Scaling is all about growth. So they don't really care what you've done in the past. They care about the potential your team has to gain customers/eyeballs in the future. This is why you see teams like Tulane (New Orleans), Rice (Houston), and UTSA (San Antonio) being talked about as "better" options than other teams with a much more storied and successful football tradition.

The reality is that Wyoming football is a niche business with a relatively small customer base. We have a dedicated customer base, but because that customer base doesn't have much room for growth, nobody cares. Wyoming football is a "mom and pop" store going toe to toe with the Walmart's of college football - we all know how that ends.

 

[307bball]

That's a very thoughtful take. In hindsight, it's hard to disagree. I'd say that the state of college football has changed so much in that timeframe that even if we had made a change I'm not sure it would have mattered.

All of the realignment that's happened since 2018 is about athletic budgets and perceived media markets. Winning isn't even figured into the equation when comes to desirability (see CSU for the last decade). I don't see a reasonable path to improving either budget or media market.

Interesting thought experiment, but even had we brought in a huge name like Nick Saban and made a college football playoff or two, I don't think it actually changes where we are at now with the shifting college football landscape.

College football has accelerated down the for-profit business model over the last decade. That was always going to have disastrous repercussion for Wyoming athletics. Conferences are looking for teams that help them scale their business of college football. Scaling is all about growth. So they don't really care what you've done in the past. They care about the potential your team has to gain customers/eyeballs in the future. This is why you see teams like Tulane (New Orleans), Rice (Houston), and UTSA (San Antonio) being talked about as "better" options than other teams with a much more storied and successful football tradition.

The reality is that Wyoming football is a niche business with a relatively small customer base. We have a dedicated customer base, but because that customer base doesn't have much room for growth, nobody cares. Wyoming football is a "mom and pop" store going toe to toe with the Walmart's of college football - we all know how that ends.

You two are right...there is still a high likelihood that it fails. The only way to get above the bar by today would have been to use the momentum from the Josh Allen years to occupy the top of the MWC competitive power structure along with Boise State. With success over time....build an audience. Long shot for sure...probably extremely long.

The bottom line....long term sustained success, as unlikely as it seems to be anymore in Laramie, still seems more likely than a Wyoming population boom.

 

[stymeman]

Interesting thought experiment, but even had we brought in a huge name like Nick Saban and made a college football playoff or two, I don't think it actually changes where we are at now with the shifting college football landscape.

College football has accelerated down the for-profit business model over the last decade. That was always going to have disastrous repercussion for Wyoming athletics. Conferences are looking for teams that help them scale their business of college football. Scaling is all about growth. So they don't really care what you've done in the past. They care about the potential your team has to gain customers/eyeballs in the future. This is why you see teams like Tulane (New Orleans), Rice (Houston), and UTSA (San Antonio) being talked about as "better" options than other teams with a much more storied and successful football tradition.

The reality is that Wyoming football is a niche business with a relatively small customer base. We have a dedicated customer base, but because that customer base doesn't have much room for growth, nobody cares. Wyoming football is a "mom and pop" store going toe to toe with the Walmart's of college football - we all know how that ends.

Well said, great but sad ending!!

 

[ragtimejoe1]

We should have tied the AD salary to market value of the program and non-student-, non-tuition-, non-govt-revenue as well as overall athletic program success. We should have limited the percentage of the athletic department budget that comes from those categories. Why? Because those revenue streams build complacency. If the AD couldn't survive without those (or minimal input), then it was time to consider levels of athletics that could be sustained without them or minimal input from them.

Before anyone says a damn thing, look where we are. Obviously what we did didn't work, so don't tell me it would have been worse. Maybe it would have been or maybe it would have weeded out dead weight. Maybe it would have been an environment that bred success and bulldogs fighting for every scrap for survival. You want it? Get it. Don't bitch to the taxpayers and students asking them to foot the bill for your job. Either build a program that can thrive in the modern era or don't. Either build it or quit wasting our damn time and investment (time, monetary, emotional haha, etc.).

Either that, or if the students and taxpayers fund the athletic department at x% then x% of the scholarships should only go to WYO kids. Yeah, we might not be competitive, but, what we've done hasn't been that great either, so there's that.

 

[307bball]

We should have tied the AD salary to market value of the program and non-student-, non-tuition-, non-govt-revenue as well as overall athletic program success. We should have limited the percentage of the athletic department budget that comes from those categories. Why? Because those revenue streams build complacency. If the AD couldn't survive without those (or minimal input), then it was time to consider levels of athletics that could be sustained without them or minimal input from them.

Before anyone says a damn thing, look where we are. Obviously what we did didn't work, so don't tell me it would have been worse. Maybe it would have been or maybe it would have weeded out dead weight. Maybe it would have been an environment that bred success and bulldogs fighting for every scrap for survival. You want it? Get it. Don't bitch to the taxpayers and students asking them to foot the bill for your job. Either build a program that can thrive in the modern era or don't. Either build it or quit wasting our damn time and investment (time, monetary, emotional haha, etc.).

Either that, or if the students and taxpayers fund the athletic department at x% then x% of the scholarships should only go to WYO kids. Yeah, we might not be competitive, but, what we've done hasn't been that great either, so there's that.

If you rewind the clock (impossible, I know)...it's just so difficult to even imagine being in a better enough place today that we would not be being left behind. What you lay out is as good as anything I've heard. If there is an alternate universe out there where Wyoming is the darling, it seems like it would have had to have come through dominance on the field. The incentive structure you describe would definitely disrupt complacency....The devil's advocate in me says that it would probably just produce instability and chaos but the point of this thread was to point out that risking instability and chaos would have at least produced something different. It's kind of a high risk high reward kind of move but at this point I can't see a scenario with any likelihood that we don't end up in the dregs.

 

[TheRealUW]

Take a look at every other school with a similar profile to the University of Wyoming- those located in rural states with basically no TV market to speak of (Montana, Montana State, North Dakota, NDSU, South Dakota, SDSU, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware, Alaska).

They are all FCS and have been for a long time. Wyoming really is an outlier.

 

[Cowpoke99]

Take a look at every other school with a similar profile to the University of Wyoming- those located in rural states with basically no TV market to speak of (Montana, Montana State, North Dakota, NDSU, South Dakota, SDSU, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware, Alaska).

They are all FCS and have been for a long time. Wyoming really is an outlier.

That is what makes Wyoming and Laramie in particular such a special place. A disservice is being done by those in charge for allowing Burman to screw this up so badly.