TEMPE, Ariz. -- For seven years, four months and 18 days, Andrew Wingard held a grudge against Trey McBride.
It all started with a play that has faded into a distant memory. Few can recall the moment on that Oct. 26, 2018, night, when Colorado State and Wyoming played the 110th edition of their Border War rivalry. The way Wingard, a senior on that Cowboys team, tells it, he was on the ground after making a tackle when McBride, a Rams freshman tight end at the time, speared him in the back and kneed him in the ribs.
Wingard took offense -- and then some.
McBride, on the other hand, contests Wingard's account of the play.
"I don't know about the spear in the back, things like that," said McBride, currently a star tight end for the Arizona Cardinals. "It was just playing through the whistle, whatever it is.
"Me and him got a little tangled up. It was unfortunate, but yes, he's held a grudge for a while."
But McBride didn't realize how long Wingard held a grudge.
"I knew he was frustrated at the play," McBride said. "The whole fanbase was mad at me, Wyoming. But like I said, it was such a long time ago. I honestly, it kind of spaced my mind.
"And then as you see him throughout your years and you keep playing against him, you just kind of always go back to like, man, hopefully he forgot about it, and he never did."
Wingard had chances to let it go, but he wouldn't. He carried it from the mountains of Fort Collins, Colorado, site of Saturday's 118th Border War, to the plains of Laramie, Wyoming, to the shores of Jacksonville, Florida, to cities around the NFL. After the two faced each other in November when Wingard was still playing for the Jaguars, McBride came over to Wingard to tell him he respected him. All Wingard could say in response was "F--- you." Looking back on it now, Wingard regrets that he didn't leave his feelings inside the white lines during the 60 minutes they played.
But in March, Wingard finally released his grudge against McBride in the Arizona desert.
It was time, Wingard felt. The two were no longer bitter college rivals. Wingard was signing with the Cardinals as a free agent, and they were going to be teammates. As fate would have it, the first person Wingard saw when he arrived at the Cardinals' practice facility in Arizona to sign his contract on March 16 was McBride.
"It was kind of like the 'Step Brothers' moment where it was like, OK, I'm over it sort of thing," Wingard said of the 2008 Will Ferrell comedy. "And it was funny because he was the first guy I saw when I came in and signed my contract and it was just like, all right man. Yeah, I'm over it. I'm over it.
"So, we're cool now."
McBride thought the moment was funny.
"We made eye contact and the first thing he said was, 'All right man, we can be friends now because we're teammates,'" McBride said. "So, it was just cool."
Now, Wingard said, McBride is "one of my guys on the team."
The two have come so far, and it only took a decade.
However, those who knew McBride and Wingard in college weren't surprised by how either acted on the play and after.
"I can tell both players had a similar personality trait of being ultracompetitive and somewhat edgy," former Wyoming coach Craig Bohl said. Bohl convinced McBride to take a recruiting trip to Wyoming as a high schooler but knew the chances of landing McBride were "slim and none" because McBride's older brother was already at Colorado State.
"I can tell you, if the roles were reversed, I would say Trey would probably hold a grudge that long also."
Former Colorado State tight end Cam Butler played alongside McBride for two seasons before missing the 2020 season with a foot injury, and said McBride was "great to play with."
"He would be an awful person to play against because he just doesn't care," Butler said.
Former Colorado State offensive coordinator Dave Johnson couldn't think of which scuffle it was that McBride got into it with Wingard. And for good reason. It wasn't that McBride had a short fuse, but if an opponent was "putting a little mustard on a player after a tackle," then McBride wouldn't put up with that, Johnson explained.
"Trey was known to get into scuffles," Johnson said, "so it's a little difficult to pinpoint which one you're talking about, because he was apt to be involved in a couple things during the course of games."
And the Border War just meant emotions ran even higher.
The two schools are separated by just 62 miles, an exact distance Bohl quickly rattled off. Bohl said he always got along with the Colorado State head coaches but knew "a lot" of the opposing players "had some spark" between them because some had known each other, grew up with each other or played each other before they got to college.
"The Border War, it was everything for those two schools," Butler said. "We didn't like them. They didn't like us. It was that kind of thing."
The game is played for the Bronze Boot, a trophy the winning team has kept since its introduction in 1968. The pomp and circumstance for the long, heated rivalry goes beyond the game. On Friday, the day before the game, the Wyoming ROTC will hand the game ball off to the Colorado State ROTC, which will then carry the ball back to Fort Collins.
"It goes back years and years and years across families," Bohl said. "You've got some families where one person went to CSU, the other person went to Wyoming, and so there's respect, but there's no love lost between the two."
Butler remembered on the Monday of one of his Wyoming game weeks, former Rams running backs coach Bryan Applewhite stood in front of the offense and instead of going over stats, like he'd typically do in that weekly meeting, Applewhite pulled up a photo of Wingard with one specific instruction: Don't let him affect the game.
"I know Trey some, I mean, he and [Wingard], if you put those two in a box, that's why they [were so] competitive,'" Bohl said. "They ain't going to be warm, fuzzy guys.
"Now, they're probably going to be best of friends."
