怀俄明

Early years

After struggling for much of the first half of the century, Wyoming football rose to regional power status in the late 1940s. Between 1949 and 1961, the Cowboys won the Mountain States Conference championship seven times, including four in a row under coach Bob Devaney from 1958 to 1961. After joining the Western Athletic Conference in 1962, the program added three more championships from 1966 to 1968, led by coach Lloyd Eaton.

Black 14

In 1969, 14 black team members wore black armbands to a practice, intending to protest the alleged racism they had experienced at their last game with an upcoming opponent, BYU. ^[] Head coach Lloyd Eaton expelled them from the team, "triggering an uproar that consumed the rest of the football season and much of everything else in the tiny college town of Laramie, Wyoming."^[][]

In 2018, filmmaker Darius Monroe released a documentary short about the athletes: Black 14. The short "uses only archival footage to tell the story, mostly from local ABC and NBC affiliates in Wyoming, letting the principals – from the students, to the coach, to the school president and even the state’s governor – speak for themselves."