Defending Class 3A champion Star Valley and defending 2A champion Wheatland will both enter 2016 with new head coaches.
Their odds of winning a second straight title with a new coach, given Wyoming’s history with such attempts, are long.
Of the 291 teams that have won Wyoming state championships, teams have tried for a repeat championship with a new coach 31 times (including Star Valley and Wheatland this year). So far, only two of those 31 teams have repeated as state champs.
Those two teams were the Byron team of 1958 and the Powell team of 1967.
Byron won the Class B 11-man championship in 1957 under Lou Maiben and won the title again in 1958 under new coach John Whatcott.
Powell, meanwhile, won the Class AA title under Vince Zimmer in 1966 and won the AA title for a second time in 1967 with Fran Gillette as the new coach.
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In general, Wyoming football teams repeat as state champions about 24 percent of the time (70 repeat champions out of 291 total championships).
Those odds drop significantly when considering if the team has a new head coach — those teams, like Star Valley and Wheatland this year, only repeat about 7 percent of the time (2 repeat champs with new coaches out of 29 teams with such opportunities so far).
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Star Valley enters 2016 with McKay Young as its new coach, replacing Chris Howell; Wheatland will have Tom Waring as its coach in 2016, as he takes over for Dusty Hudson. History shows they have tough — but not impossible — tasks ahead.
Neither Howell nor Hudson will be a head football coach in Wyoming this season. That means Walter Dowler will retain a unique spot among Wyoming head coaches all to himself: He’s the only coach to repeat as a state champion after jumping from one school to another. Dowler won the Class AA title as the head coach at Rock Springs in 1940, then repeated the AA title as the head coach at Cheyenne Central a year later.
–patrick