Five words of advice, CSU: There’s only one Deion Sanders.
Celebrity football coaching hires are a Hail Mary into a shark tank. Coach Prime brought a gold jacket, two Heisman Trophy-level talents in his luggage and national talking heads in his back pocket, ready to throw down for dear old CU. Or whichever school Sanders landed at.
But Bill Belichick? All soap opera. No substance.
Trent Dilfer? Fired after a 9-21 record at UAB.
Eddie George? 3-4 at Bowling Green. TBD.
DeSean Jackson? 4-3 at Delaware State. TBD.
Tim Tebow? A Rocky Mountain Showdown of Superman vs. Coach Prime would send ESPN into nuclear meltdown every six minutes.
Jay Norvell was finally let go in FoCo on Sunday after a month of awkward, uncomfortable speculation. The Rams need a football coach and a splash. Not necessarily in that order.
Speaking of splash, in August, I asked Broncos legend Terrell Davis, known pal of CSU president Amy Parsons, if he’d ever want to follow in Coach Prime’s footsteps.
“College coaching, I’ve never done that after I’ve played the game,” TD said, pondering as we spoke. “Unofficially, I’ve worked with some college kids. I did high school coaching.
“So I would never say ‘never.’ I’m a ‘never, never, say never’ guy. But highly unlikely that I would actually coach. Highly unlikely. Like, be a coach-coach? Full-time coach? Highly unlikely.”
OK, so that’s a ‘no.’ For now.
Call him anyway. Chase your Deion.
Just don’t forget to chase your Niko, too.
If I’m CSU athletic director John Weber, I want the kind of juice in my football program that Medved brought to men’s basketball. I want the next rising star in coaching circles. I want an up-and-comer who, if he does what I want and what the fans want, will probably be plucked by a Big Ten or SEC suitor one day.
I want someone I have to scrap to hire and fight to keep. Someone hip enough to relate to kids, young enough to evolve, confident enough to delegate and stubborn enough to chase championships.
I want Collin Klein.
Klein is Texas A&M’s offensive coordinator. Let’s get this out of the way: He’s not Mike Bobo. He just turned 36. He played football at Loveland before turning into a Tebow-esque Heisman Trophy finalist for Kansas State.
He’s called plays for Bill Snyder. His offense under Chris Klieman won K-State a Big 12 title in 2022. His crew at College Station started the week averaging 36.1 points, 464.3 yards and 197 rushing yards per game.
He also knows the territory. He’s lived here. He’s recruited here. He’d open doors locally that Bobo, Steve Addazio and even Norvell either dismissed or ignored entirely.
And no, you can’t build a regional power, let alone a national one, on the backs of Colorado prep products. But you could start some pretty good offensive lines and linebacker rooms with them, last I checked.
CSU isn’t a great job. It’s a good one. A tricky one, too. The Rams are framing the Pac-12 as a leap, but it’s more of a logistical hop. Any Pac-12 without USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington isn’t the Pac-12 — it’s Mountain West-plus.
And among the schools that will comprise the new-look MW+, the Rams might be the fourth-best job out of an eight-team mix. Washington State and Oregon State have decades of deeper coffers. Boise State offers better brand value. On facilities, CSU should blow San Diego State, Fresno State and Utah State out of the water. On the field? Flip a coin.
Meanwhile, college football is working against CSU, and its soon-to-be Pac-12 peers, on multiple fronts. Just as the Big Ten and SEC treat the Big 12 and ACC rosters as minor-league feeder clubs, the Big 12 and ACC feel free to raid the Pac-12, AAC, and on down the line. When money and television drive the train, instability is the only constant.
CSU can either pull a CU and turn the athletic department over to an independent media empire, or it can counter-program and double down on the grass-roots approach, the eternal verities that Medved espoused. Niko also out-worked, out-recruited and out-coached most of his peers.
And he delivered what Rams faithful want first and foremost: dominance in their league and promises delivered. Norvell, in hindsight, fell short on both counts.
CSU never found its Carson Strong, a quarterback who could elevate the Rams the way Strong elevated Norvell’s Nevada squads. If you’re wondering where the Jay Era went wrong, start there. Clay Millen was supposed to be the franchise. Then Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi was supposed to save it. The former was shell-shocked by one of the worst offensive lines imaginable in 2021 and eventually flat-lined. The latter peaked as a redshirt freshman.
Norvell was — and is — a good soul. But an old one. He despised the ideas of pay-for-play, of agents, or third parties, of the lines between Power 4 football and the NFL blurring more by the day. Norvell fell reasonably on the curve, but where the curve was in 2018.
Not long after he was hired, the landscape shifted in ways CSU claimed they saw coming and in other directions — read: Deion — that no one in FoCo could have envisioned in Thanksgiving 2021.
Norvell was true to his beliefs and slow to adapt. A collegiate play-caller forever, he refused to give up the sheet, even when multitasking created game-management cracks that his talent simply couldn’t pave over.
Although in 2023, Norvell’s second season, that talent should have. CSU had arguably the best offensive player (Tory Horton) and best defensive player (Mo Kamara) in the Mountain West. The Rams that season went a disappointing 5-7, losing three of those games by eight points or fewer, including a double-overtime loss at CU on Sept. 16 — an outcome that, if the Rams had held on, might have changed the short-term fortunes for both programs.
CSU was promised the Air Raid. But instead of balls in the air the last three seasons, there were mostly yellow flags. It was too many weeks of watching the Rams find new, creative ways to sabotage themselves via a turnover or penalty.
Norvell last offseason hired a general manager to handle the emerging personnel stuff he disliked, but even that felt a little late. And somewhat coerced.
“I’ve told him this,” Rams GM Alex Collins said to me a few months back. “Because he always talks about, ‘Oh, my Nevada teams, my Nevada team.’
“I said, ‘Coach, if we would have moved the timeline a little bit, and you would have had that Nevada team, you would have had (your best players) for one year. Romeo Doubs would have been a UCLA Bruin. Cole Turner would have been a Washington Husky. And Carson Strong, bless his heart, probably would have finished at Cal.’”
Boum Jock, one of the stars of last year’s 8-5 Rams, is currently playing at Cal. Two of Jock’s 2024 CSU running mates, Gabe Kirschke and Nuer Gatkuoth, are now at Wake Forest. Chase Wilson, another ex-Rams linebacker, is now at West Virginia. Wideout Caleb Goodie? Cincinnati.
“If there was a phone call that came in tomorrow and it was interesting enough, I would entertain it,” Davis said of the coaching life. “It depends on where the phone call came from. And what they’re asking me to do.”
There’s only one Coach Prime. Call Collin. Before somebody else nabs him first.
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