FORT COLLINS — Somebody offered Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi $600,000 to enter the transfer portal? That coach either didn’t watch the kid’s Wyoming tape or didn’t care.
“The way we build football teams to win is being challenged by the transfer portal and NIL,” CSU football coach Jay Norvell said Wednesday as the Rams celebrated the first day of college football’s early signing period with 19 commitments.
“But something has to be done. If a school tampers with players on somebody else’s roster, they should get fined. They should be docked scholarships. Right now, people are breaking the rules and buying their way out of it … Look what’s happened all over. Look at Arizona State, Tennessee, Michigan. Nobody gets penalized for breaking the rules, so it’s very frustrating.”
Poaching accusations aside, it’s been a solid fortnight for the Rams, even with the fallout from a certain reality show that dropped earlier this month. Within 12 hours of the curtain lifting on the first wave of National Signing Day madness, Norvell had stitched together a class that ranked as the overall No. 1 in the Mountain West by 247Sports.com. CSU got off to a similar start last December before winding up at No. 3 in the league overall, per 247Sports.
Chatfield’s Dagan Myers and Ralston Valley’s Jack Moran are talented locals and legacies, while SoCal wideout Jordan Ross is a burner who the recruitniks say is one of the best prep prizes the Rammies have ever landed.
And yet the biggest win of the week was probably when all-everything receiver Tory Horton announced that he was putting off an NFL future to return for a fifth season of collegiate eligibility.
Horton? Back. Fellow wideout Justus Ross-Simmons? Back. Whatever Fowler-Nicolosi was offered on college football’s open market, the young Texan decided to double down on the Green and Gold via social media.
Half the battle for Norvell and his staff, as long as college football continues riding shotgun with the “free market,” is going to be re-recruiting the cream of his roster, every dang year.
So far, so good. Of course, now that you’ve secured BFN, the next step is developing him. Dude’s game didn’t improve much between Boulder and Honolulu, if we’re being frank, while the offense went pretty much as he did — all over the place. Fowler-Nicolosi’s highs (22 touchdown passes, that Boise State second half) and lows (16 picks, that Boise State first half) turned the Rammies into the kind of roller-coaster ride that would be banned in 17 states.
In hindsight, Norvell’s Year 2 might’ve produced the most 5-7 of any 5-7 team in recent memory. The bad came with “yeah, buts.” The good had caveats. CSU beat Boise State for the first time ever, although it took the mother of all Hail Marys to pull it off. The Rams topped the Broncos and San Diego State, the Mountain West’s favorite TV teams, at home.
Flipside: An 0-3 mark in trophy games vs. CU, Air Force and Wyoming. And two of those rivalry pelts, in Boulder and at Laramie, felt as if they were ripped from the Rammies’ collective grasps.
Actually, a bunch of games fell into that camp. Seven of CSU’s tilts wound up being decided by nine points or fewer. The Rams went 3-4 in those contests.
They led big at Utah State. They were on top at UNLV with four seconds left on the clock. They led at Folsom Field with 37 seconds left. Every team the Rams beat this past autumn wound up firing their head coach.
The Buffs already suck up much of the metro’s oxygen, all things being equal. But the presence of Deion Sanders in Boulder nearly Hoovered up the lot. The only way to get some of that air back is by winning on the scoreboard.
“I had a conversation with one kid last week,” Norvell recalled. “And I just said … social media is like driving down the street and you see a party and you weren’t invited and you wish you could be in there. I told this kid, ‘You’re never going to be happy in your life if you’re peeking over your fence into somebody’s backyard and wishing you could be over there.’ That’s what social media is to these kids and they think there’s ‘something better’ out there.”
While Wednesday’s signings confirm the notion that The Norvell Express is still chugging forward, you also can’t shake the feeling that the Rammies missed a window.
That they missed a chance to rub The Jay Way in the face of a certain big brother who wears cowboy hats and sunglasses at night, in the scut of a circus that can’t find the steak to match a clamorous, bumptious sizzle.
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