FORT COLLINS — Playoffs? You kidding me? Jim Mora’s talking about playoffs? At CSU?
“Yes. 100%,” Rams athletic director John Weber told me with a straight face Monday. “If other programs out of the Mountain West and the Pac-12 can do it, CSU can and will do it.”
“You’re convinced Jim will get you there?” I asked.
“Yes,” Weber replied. “Absolutely.”
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t stutter.
“I love to go uphill,” Jim Mora, CSU’s fourth new football coach in seven years and sixth since 2010, said during his introductory news conference at Canvas Stadium on Monday.
“And I think that’s a metaphor for my personality in general, because I love to embrace hard things. And I stood here (Monday) and I (looked out) there and I saw the top of those mountains. I said, ‘I’m going to get up there, you know?’”
At that point, the Rams coach stopped. Turns out he had a question for the rest of us.
“How many 14ers are there in this state?” Mora asked the crowd.
“Fifty-four,” came the reply.
(Actually, it’s 53. Or 58. Or 74.)
“I didn’t say I was going to tell you all our goals, OK,” Mora continued with a grin. “We’re going to win a Pac-12 championship. All right? We’re going to go (try) to win a national championship. And I’m going to scale 54 14ers.”
The football mountains facing CSU might be the tougher climb. Although give him credit for this much — Mora, an outdoors enthusiast, arguably rolled into town Sunday as the best FBS football coach within a 90-mile radius of Fort Fun.
Deion Sanders made the CU Buffs marketable and sexy, yes — but also maddeningly inconsistent on the field. He’s 16-21 since 2023. Air Force’s Troy Calhoun, long the gold standard, is just 9-15 with the Zoomies over the last two seasons.
Mora won at UCLA. He won at UConn. If you can make it there, as the song goes …
“It’s about the opportunity to compete for a championship and get in the CFP and win when we get there,” Weber continued. “That’s what we’re about, that’s what we aspire to, that’s what we’re focused on. And he was clearly set on an opportunity that allowed him to do the exact same thing. That’s how we came together.”
Connecticut’s path to the College Football Playoff, as an independent, is a pipe dream. CSU, meanwhile, hosts BYU next fall. Arizona is slated to visit FoCo in ’27. CSU heads to Wisconsin in September 2027 and Oklahoma the September after that. The Rams have got CU at home in ’29 and away in ’30.
Keeler: How did CSU Rams land Jim Mora? Give assist to this former Broncos QB
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Nail one solid Power 4 hide toyour wall in August or September, followed by a league championship with an undefeated (or close to it) record, and who knows?
“Go look at the Tulanes of the world, the North Texases,” former CSU offensive lineman Jake Bennett told me Monday. “To say, just because you’re in Fort Collins, you can’t do it?”
Bennett’s a believer. Mind you, he’s been fooled before. Mora spoke to a full house on the fourth-floor suites at Canvas, with Rams football alumni scattered among the staff, alumni, boosters and reporters. The No. 1 complaint I get from CSU friends is they’re backing a program that hasn’t performed anywhere near the levels aspired to by the construction of Canvas in the first place. Jay Norvell is the only football coach to win more than seven games with a Rammie squad since the building debuted in August 2017. Over the last nine seasons, seven have been losing ones.
“I was here when we opened it, and we went 7-6 (in ’16) and 7-6 (in ’17) and from there, it’s just been kind of woefully underperforming,” Bennett, who was among the Rams letter-winners in attendance to hear Mora. “Like he was saying, (like) every coach that’s been here before him, the foundation’s here. The city’s great. Why can’t you get it done?”
To that end, Weber said, he put Mora’s name down for consideration early in the process. TurnkeyZRG, the search firm CSU hired, had also pegged the former collegiate and NFL coach as possibly looking to move away from UConn.
“We continued to work our way through that entire process and came back to him — and came back to him again,” Weber recalled. “(Mora) definitely knew about us, knew about the area, knew about the opportunity, knew about the investment that we’ve been making here.”
That’s because Mora admitted he’d actually put his name in the hat for the CSU job back in 2019, when Mike Bobo was relieved of his duties. And oh, lordy, what might have been. Only in this timeline, Urban Meyer was running the CSU search then, more or less, and put forth his old pal and Florida coordinator Steve Addazio — who wasn’t exactly beloved at Boston College for reasons that became all too obvious once he showed up.
COVID-19 set Rams football back about a year. The Daz set it back about four.
Alas, what’s done is done, and there Jim was Monday, six years after the fact. If you’re of a certain age, the Mora family looms large in your folk memory. Jim’s father, in particular. Before Sean Payton hoisted the Saints to another level, the elder Jim Mora helped put the ‘Aints on the NFL map two decades earlier. Although the old man’s most famous sound bite came during a trying 2001 news conference while coaching the Colts after an even more trying defeat to the 49ers. Someone had asked Mora about playoff hopes after Indy had fallen to 4-6. The response was pure gold.
“Playoffs?” the senior Mora countered, voice climbing three octaves in just two syllables. “Don’t talk about … playoffs? You kidding me? Playoffs? I just hope we can win a game.”
They won two more and finished at 6-10. Trivia: Peyton Manning was the QB on that team — one that, did, in fact, miss the playoffs. The Colts’ defensive coordinator? Vic Fangio. The Colts’ receivers coach? Jay Norvell.
“Jay coached for my dad,” Mora said of Norvell, who was let go by Weber in October. “I grew up in this business, so I’m always very, very sensitive to the changes that take place. But as a football coach, we all understand that change is inevitable, and it’s something that we have to accept if we’re going to be in this business. When the program decided to move on from Jay, I was immediately interested.”
In a weird way, this is home for Jim. Always has been. The new CSU football coach spent his grade-school years along the Flatirons while his father was an assistant at CU under Eddie Crowder. Mora’s son Trey, who was part of the family entourage, is a Buffs grad who’s currently studying at CU’s Leeds School of Business. The coach’s mountain-scaling exploits are already the stuff of legend.
“There is no top to the mountain. There is no top,” Mora said. “You just keep going, you keep climbing. And when you reach one peak, you find a way to get to another peak … I will never put any limitations on what this football team can be ever, if we do the work. Which we will.”
It took three minutes during the presentation for Sonny Lubick’s name to come up. It took another 22 or 23 minutes for Wyoming to cross anybody’s lips, and Mora did so with the relish of a man itching for a friendly scrap.
“I think it’s Sept. 5 or 6, the Border War,” Mora said. “Let’s go!”
It’s Sept. 5, but time flies when you’re having this much Fort Fun. Jim’s line about this being his last coaching job, according to those who know him better, came from the heart. Mora had his Lane Kiffin phase. He’ll be 65 next November. Fort Collins is the kind of college town you aspire to retire in — that’s true for coaches too, from Lubick to ex-Nebraska volleyball coach Terry Pettit, who won a national championship and 21 league titles with the Cornhuskers.
Playoffs, though?
That’s some serious uphill, coach.
“It’s very realistic,” Mora said. “We have the resources — and when I speak about resources, I’m not speaking about money. I’m speaking about people and the vision and the commitment … The commitment that we make, that will determine how far we go. I’m very confident that we can do those things.”
On Monday, that confidence proved contagious. One of those proud Rams who was here to see Mora stopped me as we disembarked from the elevator at Canvas.
“That was good,” she wondered. “Wasn’t it?”
Sure was. How good, we’re all about to find out.
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