Washington State athletic director Pat Chun is leaving to join arch-rival 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.
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.
This story will be updated.
Required reading
(Photo: James Snook / USA Today)
