The 2024 season begins Friday with the start of fall camp.
Heading into Year 3 of the Norvell era, there is hope that Colorado State will end a six-year bowl drought and potentially play a role in the league for the first time since Nick Stevens was under center.
CSU was close to making it to a bowl game in 2023. Had a few plays gone differently in two or three key games, the Rams could easily have been a seven-win team. But as some of the veteran leaders explained recently at Media Days in Las Vegas, the lights were too bright for a group that came close to achieving its goals but ultimately fell short.
“If you look at last year, there are three games that stand out specifically: CU, UNLV and Hawaii,” Jack Howell told DNVR.
Howell went on to explain how brutal it was for the team to lose the game in Boulder in the final two minutes of regulation before ultimately losing in double overtime.
He mentioned the terrible way the Rams were beaten on field goals in Las Vegas and Honolulu after appearing to be in position to win.
As tough as those losses were, and as much of a glutinous experience as they were, the fourth-year safety doesn’t want to block out the experiences or try to forget them. According to Howell, they are important learning moments about what happens when a team doesn’t maintain its composure for a full 60 minutes.
“It’s just about being a team that’s been there and has experience,” Howell said of CSU’s ability to learn from past mistakes.
“A lot of teams panic in those situations. And I think we did a little bit. And, you know, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say. A lot of times people try to cover up their mistakes and we don’t want to do that. We want to own up to them.”
Howell explained that overall, on both offense and defense, the Rams took their foot off the gas and panicked a bit when things got tough. “Ultimately, that’s what caused us to lose,” he said.
“We have a lot of captains, experienced captains in this team. We have been playing together for three or four years and, as you know, having that experience will be very important.”
Tory Horton echoed Howell’s sentiments, explaining that the team had to take a hard look in the mirror and really reflect on ways they can improve.
“It’s like, where did we go wrong? What did we do wrong? And that’s what we take into account, like, what do we need to learn from this so that this doesn’t happen again?”
The fifth-year wide receiver explained that there may have been some complacency in some previous seasons. However, the guys in the locker room are approaching things with a different level of intensity this time around. Whether it’s spending more time in the film room or getting extra reps in the weight room, people are showing a clear desire to make the 2024 season different.
“We can’t get complacent,” Horton said. “Because we don’t want that feeling of going down like that, on the last play, on the last possession. We all understand why because we all had to go through that feeling.”
In addition to a favorable schedule that includes seven home games and eight programs with first-year coaches, if you’re looking for a reason to believe the Rams will eventually get over the slump, it’s that despite having very little success in recent years, the program has been able to retain its biggest stars.
Players like Jack Howell, Tory Horton, Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi and even Henry Blackburn, who decided to return for a fifth year, have managed to keep the team’s foundation intact during some pretty tough times. And if you look at what’s happening with most teams in the country right now, that’s not a very common occurrence.
If you ask the players why they decided to stay instead of pursuing other opportunities in the transfer portal, they all give credit to Norvell and the staff.
“It’s a testament to who we are as a football team,” Howell said, before adding that while there have been a few departures here and there, the guys who have chosen to stay are fully committed to turning things around together.
“We’re going to play whoever wants to be at CSU. And I’d rather have a kid who’s not a household name and wants to be at CSU badly than a big-name kid who’s kind of in, kind of out. We’ve met people who didn’t necessarily want to be here, who had one foot in and one foot out. We’re happy about that. No disrespect to them, I love some of those guys who left, but we play who we have, and who we have are the ones who want to be here.”
With one month until the Rams open the 2024 campaign against a Texas team projected to contend for a national championship and roughly six weeks until the Buffs come to Fort Collins for the first time since 1996, we’ll learn a lot about this team in the first month of the season.
Get ready for football, folks. It’s finally here.
