Washington State AD Pat Chun leaving for same job at Washington, per sources: What it means for Cougars

By Bruce Feldman, Nicole Auerbach and Christopher Kamrani

Washington State athletic director Pat Chun is leaving to join archrival Washington, program sources confirmed to The Athletic on Tuesday. Chun’s move comes one day after Washington State men’s basketball coach Kyle Smith announced he was leaving for Stanford, who joins the ACC this year.

Washington State remains one of the two remaining members of the Pac-12 conference.

Chun spent a half-dozen years at WSU after serving as FAU’s athletic director. Chun led the Cougars through a very turbulent time in recent years, most notably with the school being left behind when the Pac-12 collapsed. Washington and Oregon were able to join USC and UCLA in the move to the Big Ten, and the fallout from that upheaval is still being felt around Pullman.

Chun, an Ohio native, has Big Ten roots having spent 15 years at Ohio State working in the Buckeyes athletics department. He was considered a candidate for the OSU AD vacancy this winter, but the job ended up going to Texas A&M’s Ross Bjork.

The Chun move comes a week after Troy Dannen accepted Nebraska’s athletic director job just six months after he arrived at Washington. Dannen is replacing Trev Alberts, who left to become the AD at Texas A&M, replacing Bjork.

“I love Pat, Pat’s great and I’m thrilled that happened,” Dannen said Tuesday during his introductory news conference at Nebraska, “because Washington deserves something really, really good and someone really, really good and Pat is that guy. Pat knows the landscape. I’m just thrilled for him.”

Anne McCoy, WSU’s senior deputy AD, is very well regarded internally and is seen as a strong option to become the interim AD, the sources said.

What this means for WSU

Just when things seemed to look a bit sunnier for Washington State, the clouds returned. Wazzu and Oregon State are the beneficiaries of the Pac-12’s impressive NCAA men’s basketball tournament and so far are expected to share more than $20 million earned due to these performances.

And now, in a span of a few days, the athletic department loses Smith to Stanford and Chun to Washington. And for anyone who doesn’t know how difficult of a loss that will be, just consider that Chun is one of the more well-respected administrators in the country. He also led the Cougars through various emotional points in his tenure, including being left behind when the Pac-12 dissolved and firing former football coach Nick Rolovich in 2021 for failing to comply with the state vaccine mandate during the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So to lose him to your archrival who has jumped ship to the Big Ten, you would imagine that all the gut punches endured in Pullman the last couple years, this one has got to be up there. Where Wazzu president Kirk Schulz goes to hire Chun’s full-time successor is up in the air. Before the dissolution of the Pac-12, Washington State was a job that could’ve attracted a dynamic group of administrators.

Now?

It’s an athletic department part of a conference of just two and will be participating in a pseudo coexistence with the Mountain West Conference for football in 2024. There is currently no media rights deal for WSU or Oregon State. What was once thought of to be an intriguing Power 5 job in one of the smallest college towns in America now features a vacant seat that will be harder than ever to fill. — Christopher Kamrani, college football staff writer

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(Photo: James Snook / USA Today)