Washington State University has terminated athletic director Anne McCoy less than two years after her promotion to the position, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure marked by unprecedented conference realignment challenges and departmental instability.
The announcement, delivered through carefully worded university statements employing diplomatic language typical of administrative separations, leaves significant questions about the circumstances precipitating McCoy’s departure and whether performance concerns, strategic disagreements, or other factors drove the decision.
“Anne has provided steady leadership through one of the most complex and pivotal periods in the history of Cougar Athletics,” WSU president Elizabeth Cantwell stated. “She built a strong foundation for the programme’s future grounded in integrity, academic success, and care for our student-athletes. We are deeply grateful for Anne’s decades of service and her unwavering commitment to Washington State University.”
Cantwell’s praise, whilst effusive, follows standard protocol for announcing leadership changes regardless of whether departures are voluntary or forced. The formulaic nature of such statements rarely illuminates actual dynamics behind administrative transitions, instead serving to maintain institutional dignity, preserve relationships, and avoid potential legal complications that frank discussions might create.
McCoy assumed the interim athletic director role in March 2024 when Pat Chun departed to accept the athletic director position at the University of Washington, a move that represented both professional advancement for Chun and institutional betrayal from Washington State’s perspective given the timing during conference crisis. The university removed McCoy’s interim designation in June 2024, granting her permanent status that would last merely months before her ouster.
The compressed timeline, with McCoy receiving permanent appointment in June and termination before the year concluded, suggests either rapidly deteriorating confidence in her leadership or fundamental disagreements about departmental direction that made her position untenable. Athletic directors typically receive longer evaluation periods before institutions make permanent hiring or termination decisions, making McCoy’s brief tenure particularly noteworthy.
The school will conduct a nationwide search for the next athletic director, a process typically consuming several months as search committees evaluate candidates, conduct interviews, perform background checks, and negotiate employment terms. Jon Haarlow, WSU Athletics’ chief operating officer, will serve as interim athletic director during this transition period, providing operational continuity whilst new permanent leadership is identified.
Haarlow’s elevation from chief operating officer to interim athletic director represents standard succession planning, installing an internal candidate familiar with ongoing initiatives, budget constraints, personnel dynamics, and strategic priorities. Interim appointments serve dual purposes: maintaining operational stability during leadership vacuums whilst preserving flexibility for new permanent leaders to implement their visions without inherited commitments constraining their authority.
Among McCoy’s consequential decisions during her abbreviated tenure, she hired football coach Jimmy Rodgers and men’s basketball coach David Riley. These coaching appointments represent an athletic director’s most visible and impactful decisions, with successful coaches elevating programmes whilst poor selections set departments back for years through buyout costs, recruiting damage, and fan disillusionment.
The early performance of these coaches, particularly in high-profile revenue sports like football and basketball, likely factored significantly into evaluations of McCoy’s leadership. College athletics operates with limited patience for mediocrity in revenue sports, where ticket sales, donations, and institutional visibility create intense pressure for immediate competitive success.
McCoy’s most challenging responsibility involved navigating the catastrophic collapse of the Pac-12 Conference, a crisis unprecedented in modern college athletics that saw a century-old conference disintegrate within months. The exodus began when USC and UCLA announced departures to the Big Ten, triggering a cascade of defections that left Washington State and Oregon State as the only remaining members of what was once among college sports’ most prestigious conferences.
This conference apocalypse, driven by media revenue disparities and realignment dynamics beyond any single athletic director’s control, thrust McCoy into crisis management requiring skills rarely demanded of athletic administrators. Rather than optimising competitive positioning within a stable conference structure, she faced the existential challenge of either joining another conference as a diminished supplicant or reconstructing the Pac-12 from ruins.
McCoy participated in the ultimately successful effort to rebuild the Pac-12 by adding nine schools and negotiating media rights deals for the reconstructed league. This accomplishment, whilst significant, came with profound uncertainty about whether the rebuilt conference can achieve financial and competitive parity with Power Five conferences that secured billion-dollar media deals and coast-to-coast geographic footprints.
