Underdogs by Design: Sundance Wicks Reflects on Wyoming’s First Winning Season in Four Years
- Jeff Bugher
- a few seconds ago
- 4 min read
LARAMIE, Wyo. – The current era of college basketball is rapidly changing, defined by NIL money and transfer portal movement. University of Wyoming men’s basketball head coach Sundance Wicks believes success should be measured differently than what’s written on checks.
The formula is simple: wins relative to the resources you have.
Easier said than done, but then again, Sundance is doing exactly that. After guiding Wyoming to its first winning season in four years, Wicks says the accomplishment carries extra meaning considering how dramatically the roster changed and the financial realities his program faces compared to other programs in the Mountain West.
“I think coaches should be judged on their price per win,” Wicks said. “That's what I think coaches should be judged on. So you spend a lot of money and you don't get a lot of wins. You should be judged by that. You don't spend a lot of money and you get a lot of wins. You should be judged by that.”
The current NIL landscape has created a widening gap between smaller programs and those of large programs with big pockets. Wicks states that the imbalance should be part of the conversation when evaluating the program's success.
“I think it's in this landscape until you can get to some stability where there's a salary cap or whatever, and it kind of levels out when people are spending exorbitant amounts of money on rosters and winning at an average level, like that shouldn't be accepted, right?” Wicks said. “And that's the NBA. The NBA doesn't accept that stuff.”
Despite operating without the financial advantages of conference competitors, Wyoming has embraced the underdog mentality.
“For us, we're just, we're punching above our weight right now,” Wicks said. “I love it. I told our guys I was so proud of them in the locker room in San Jose. I don't think people quite understand me. What we're doing and how we're doing it and the budget that we had to do it with, we celebrate that stuff.”
That sense of pride stems not just from how the roster was constructed. The roster coming into the 2025-2026 season had just two returning players. What kind of magic wand does Sundance have to be able to have a winning record?
Compared to the 2024–25 team, Wyoming’s roster underwent significant turnover. Last season featured players such as Obi Agbim, Jordan Nesbitt, Kobe Newton, Scottie Ebube, Touko Tainamo, and Dontaie Allen. By the 2025–26 season, the Cowboys looked drastically different, with a core that included Leland Walker, Nasir Meyer, Damarion Dennis, Khaden Bennett, and several freshmen and international additions.
Only a handful of players carried over into the next season, including Abou Magassa and Matija Belic, illustrating how quickly the roster evolved under Wicks’ direction.
Instead of chasing the biggest names in the portal, Wicks said the staff focused on finding players whose performance would exceed their perceived value.
“So those are all points of pride for us,” Wicks said. “And we just, we want to make people feel it. That's the pressure we want to put on people is we want to make them earn their money, right? We want to make them earn it.”
Player development has been a key part of that strategy. According to Wicks, nearly every player in the program has improved upon arriving in Laramie.
“Though for us, each of our guys are playing, at a caliber that's better than when they came,” Wicks said. “All of our players are having better seasons than where they were before. They transferred in. They transferred up levels and increased productivity and efficiency.”
Wicks gives a lot of the credit to his coaching staff.
“And that's a testament to our staff, the way we've developed players, and then the buy-in and the belief that these guys have in what we're doing,” Wicks said. “And you don't get that at every program in the United States of America.”
Wicks believes the key to roster building in the NIL era is making sure every player adds tangible value.
“You get a lot of guys that stay the same or regress or are, basically a net negative in what they should be doing,” he said. “we want that if there's a guy that has a salary, we want your potential production value to be greater than what it is, right?”
In other words, players should outperform expectations.
“You say, oh, well, this guy's worth this and we want him to play better than what he's worth,” Wicks said. “and not sit there and be like, this guy's a net negative.”
That philosophy is why Wicks believes Wyoming’s roster construction has been one of the program’s biggest strengths.
“Like you're paying a guy and he's not producing or he's not helping you win. He's not impacted winning. I mean, to me, that's bad roster management,” Wicks said. “And we have had elite roster management in our program with the guys that we have, with the amount of money that we get and the amount of money that they get paid.”
The results speak for themselves.
“We've had elite roster management even in the last two years with those guys,” he added. “Their production value is way higher and potential production value is way higher than when they came in.”
In a sport where success is increasingly tied to financial resources, Wyoming’s winning season points directly to the head man, Sundance Wicks, and his staff.
About the Author:
Jeff Bugher is a third-generation Wyomingite living in Casper. He is a sportswriter and Wyoming Cowboys/Cowgirls enthusiast who is a member of the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA ) and the National Sports Media Association (NSMA). Jeff's work has been cited by Sports Illustrated, one of the world's leading sports publications.
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