A new direction for wyoming-football.com

When I was 17 months old, my mom — in a letter to a relative — made a list of all the words I could say. It included the important words, like Mama, and Daddy, and Aggie (the name of our dog). But there were others. Lots of others:

So, yeah, you could say I was born for this career path. When one of your first words is “basketball,” and you’re like 400% ahead of what is typically the case for language acquisition at a given age (the books weren’t wrong, Mom), I guess it makes sense I became a sportswriter.

That phase of my career lasted five years, and in that time I started wyoming-football.com. As I transitioned from sportswriter to college journalism professor and student media adviser, what I’ve been doing professionally since January 2012, I’ve added wyoming-basketball.com and champlists.com to the world. I continue to work on Wyoming sports history projects related to those three sites and on other projects that are, as of this moment, still not public. I hope to share them with you in the future.

While I have truly enjoyed both doing and continuing this research, it has come at a price.

A couple years ago, I made the decision to step back from live coverage during the football season. And that was the right decision, both then and now.

Moving forward, I am going to continue to step back from in-season coverage by stopping two traditional staples to the site — weekly in-season picks and preseason coverage. Also coming to an end are in-season score updates, standings, schedules and playoff brackets. All such material will be uploaded at the end of the season, much like I do with Champlists now for other sports and with wyoming-basketball.com for hoops.

At this point, I do not know if the annual Wyoming high school football preview magazine will continue. I hope it does, and I hope the publishers can find someone to pick up where I left off and make this tradition even better.

Without the knowledge I gain from the preseason interviews, though, that also means I will no longer produce the class-by-class previews and predictions or the top returning players, which typically publish in July and August leading up to the first week of games. I will also not track offseason coaching changes. Furthermore, I will no longer be in a position to make even somewhat informed picks for upcoming games. So, after 20 years of doing so, all the way back to 2005 and my days picking games for the Casper Star-Tribune and the old Sports Goulash blog (where my posts and your comments have long since been sacrificed to the link rot gods), those weekly posts will come to an end.

As for wyoming-basketball.com, it’s time once again to thank “Stat Rat” Jim Craig for all the research he has done into Wyoming high school basketball history. As long as he is willing to do the research, I will continue to post and promote it, hopefully giving it the home and the platform it deserves.

I will be deleting my Twitter account, @wyomingfootball, after more than a decade of posting there, as well as the related accounts @wyominghoops and @champlists. I am strongly opposed to my work being used to train AI models without my consent, and my continued presence there, even in an archived form, would go against what I think is ethically appropriate. The platforms are also intentionally limiting the reach of posts that include links, which is, well, most of mine. Time to go.

A few paragraphs ago, I noted the price of this work. Let’s be clear: The price has been my time. Hundreds of hours each year go toward the current football season alone. It’s time I’m no longer willing to invest. Over the past two decades, but especially over the past decade as I transitioned from sportswriter to educator, I have continually denied myself both personal and professional opportunities so I would have the time to devote to you, this site and this history that, if you’re reading this, you probably think is important, too. For a variety of reasons, those are sacrifices I’m no longer willing to make.

That said, I’m still interested in sharing stories about Wyoming’s sports history, like those of Richard Luman, the 1930 all-state football team, the Queen Marie trophy (still has yet to be found), the history of Armistice Day games, historical fanfic about the state of Absaroka, tracksters like Ned Turner and Bob Wood, or series I’ve done like Wyoming’s underdog teams and all-decade recognition.

For football, I put 26,613 Wyoming high school football games, the records of 5,880 seasons, in one place. Across all sports on Champlists, I’ve strung together 16,022 individual/relay state champions across 20 individual sports and 22,623 all-state selections across seven team sports, and I’ve posted more than 3,100 team champions. Thanks to the research therein, we’ve been able to answer questions that were previously unanswerable without, well, the investment in time that those answers would have required — like, who’s Wyoming’s winningest high school basketball coach? or who were the state football champions in World War II? or, well, how did we get here?

That’s the kind of storytelling I am eager to continue. They are the kind of stories that I hoped my research would help to unearth in the first place.

I’m still digging. But I’m also close to done, and I’m proud of the archives I’ve built and that you all have helped me to build. I hope the archives I’ve created long outlive me, and I hope they can be used to answer questions I haven’t even thought to ask yet.

My focus on this site now will be nearly exclusively on the past, much like I already do with other sports. I’ll leave the present and the future to others, at least when it comes to Wyoming sports.

I’ve been reminded many, many times in the past 20 years that there are bigger things in life than sports. “Cheese,” “kitty kat,” “tree,” “kaboom” — maybe those words from my baby word list are just as deserving of my time as “basketball.” Maybe more deserving. Maybe it’s time to devote my talents and time to those. For now, the three words I’m choosing to focus on that even 17-month-old me knew how to say? “Hug,” “done,” and “bye.”

–patrick