Chun Turns in his Cougar Crimson for Husky Purple

Marv Harshman did it. So did Dick Baird. Scott Pelluer, Bob Gregory, Noah Williams and Steve Morton, to name a few -- all of them flipped their athletic allegiances from Washington State University to the University of Washington.

They drove through the Palouse, crossed the Columbia River, went up and over Snoqualmie Pass and never looked back.

On Thursday, Pat Chun joined this growing list of people who have switched their loyalties from one state rival school to the other, becoming the Huskies' 19th athletic director after a six-year run with the Cougars.

In the Don James Center at Husky Stadium, Chun received what's become a routine exercise at the UW. With the Husky band playing loudly, he entered a room full of donors, staffers and media members, was praised as the right man man for the job by President Ana Mari Cauce, who actually claimed the school conducted a nationwide search to find him, and he received the symbolic Husky jersey with his name on the back.

Prior to this introductory moment, WSU president Kirk Schulz across the state had voiced his displeasure over losing his top athletic administrator -- not that Chun necessarily left the school, but that he ended up 275 miles away in Montlake. The Cougars have been in a survival mode since the UW, Oregon, USC and UCLA basically broke up the Pac-12 by moving to the Big Ten, sending everyone else except WSU and Oregon State scrambling to find a new conference.

"Given all the stuff that's happened with the University of Washington over the last year I was like, 'There's no way a person is going to move as a senior athletics administrator from WSU to the University of Washington,' " Schulz told 247Sports. "Still a little shocked by it, to be honest ... I'm upset about the timing of Pat leaving,"

Yet all is fair in athletic love and war these days, where administrators, coaches and players change universities in the blink of an eye, unconcerned about the fallout or maintaining relationships. A lot of people are getting their feelings hurt by sudden moves.

"We're all human," Chun said, doing damage control. " What our final conversations were, Kirk was a class act. We will stay connected with them."

Chun will replace the very temporary Troy Dannen, who arrived from Tulane in October to replace Jen Cohen, who left the UW for USC, and Dannen stayed less than six months before bolting to Nebraska last week.

It was Cohen who called Chun ironically in Omaha, where the Cougars were preparing for an NCAA Tournament appearance, and got him thinking about taking her old job.

"It was the farthest thing from my mind eight days ago," he said of the Husky AD position.

Chun, of Korean-American descent and an Ohio native, no doubt was drawn to a school that will enter the Big Ten, one of college sports' biggest platforms. He graduated from Ohio State, served in a variety of roles at his alma mater up to assistant athletic director for 15 years and was widely thought to be a serious candidate to replace retiring Buckeyes AD Gene Smith until the school went with someone else this week.

In the short amount of time he met with the media, Chun came off as an overly serious personality, a no-nonsense kind of guy. He's well respected in his profession, having served on multiple NCAA committees and he's kept the WSU athletic teams competitive and successful. He chose not to attend the Wednesday news conference for new Husky basketball coach Danny Sprinkle so as not distract from that moment.

Chun acknowledged he was shocked by Dannen leaving the UW so quickly. He'll attempt to mend fences with WSU. But he can't dwell on any of that too long, because he's got work to do.

"Clearly the Big Ten is choosing to take a leadership role," he said of his job in a new conference. "I know the goals of Ana Mari and the board (of regents). Washington wants to have a voice."