In a matter of 27 hours, WSU has lost its men’s basketball coach and athletic director.
Former WSU AD Pat Chun will trade his crimson and gray for purple and gold as he accepted the Washington AD job Tuesday morning, according to ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
Kyle Smith became the head man at Stanford, Monday morning while Chun will be heading less than six hours west to Seattle to lead Washington Athletics in its first year in the Big Ten Conference. Chun received a six-year contract from UW, according to Thamel.
“We appreciate Pat Chun’s six years of service as Director of Athletics and are disappointed by his departure,” WSU President Kirk Schulz said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
WSU men’s basketball lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament Saturday. In the days since Wazzu’s touchdown in Pullman from Omaha, Nebraska, Smith and Chun have each left the Palouse.
Chun leaves Pullman at a time when WSU and Oregon State University are left without a power conference home after USC, UCLA and Chun’s new employer UW, along with seven other Pac-12 schools joined different conferences.
“These two universities are in a fight together,” Chun said during WSU and OSU’s joint press conference in September prior to the WSU-OSU football game in Pullman.
The former WSU AD joins a school his prior employer sued for control of Pac-12 Conference assets. After seeing WSU through a legal battle with their sister public in-state institution, he joins that same UW athletic department that will deal with half-shares in the Big Ten Conference and a significant amount of travel to play Big Ten opponents, the vast majority sit more than 2,000 miles away from Seattle.
Chun leaves WSU having led a remarkable rise in fundraising. WSU Athletics raised more than $31 million per year under Chun, up from the $11.5 million WSU gained annually from 2014–18, according to the Seattle Times.
Chun started at WSU in 2018 and oversaw the hiring of Smith, who won 94 games in five years and capped off his tenure with the school’s first men’s NCAA Tournament berth since 2008. He also hired women’s basketball coach Kamie Ethridge, who led WSU to four-straight postseasons and the 2023 Pac-12 Tournament Championship, baseball coaches Brian Green and Nathan Choate, football coaches Nick Rolovich and Jake Dickert, tennis coach Raquel Atawo, women’s golf coach Sofie Aagaard and volleyball coach Korey Schroeder.
Chun saw football coach Mike Leach, volleyball coach Jen Greeny and, most recently, Smith leave WSU after historic tenures. He leaves WSU with more than $240 million in debt as of November 2023, according to a Daily Evergreen article, but he inherited a vast majority of that debt when he took the job in 2018 and experienced the pandemic, declining enrollment and the collapse of a 108-year-old conference during his tenure.
He will step into a UW athletic department with debt service to repay renovations to Husky Stadium expected to increase from $9.8 million annually to $17.7 million over the next several years, according to the Seattle Times.
Former UW AD Troy Dannen accepted the Nebraska job after just seven months on Montlake. In that tenure, he oversaw the hiring of former Arizona football coach Jedd Fisch in the wake of Kalen Deboer’s post-Natonal Championship game departure to Alabama and set in motion the hiring of former Utah State coach Danny Sprinkle to lead Husky men’s hoops.
Prior to his six years at WSU, Chun led Flordia Atlantic University for five years and prior to that, held various roles for 15 years at his alma mater and Big Ten pillar, Ohio State.
Chun was named to the College Football Playoff Selection Committee in February.
Chun leaves WSU without a men’s basketball coach or a long-term conference plan.
