Rams Remain Confident About What the Future Holds

The disappointment was there. Waking up Sunday morning, the team couldn't shake the feeling. The night before as a football team, Colorado State missed a chance to put a hammer down, but instead, had one swinging back in their direction.

You don't just shake off allowing 37 unanswered points after jumping out to a 17-0 lead. You also don't discard the faith, either. Both can reside in the same brain at the same time. Saveyon Henderson knows for a fact.

"Gotta get better," Henderson said was his first thought as he headed back to Canvas Stadium. "As a team, we all understood what we did wrong and what we did right. We have to eliminate the wrong and do more that's right.

"But there was no doubt at all. There was never a doubt where I lost confidence in my brothers. I would go 100 percent for them every time. Never a doubt."

The loss felt like a step back for a team coming off two consecutive victories, one which leaves the Rams 2-3 overall, 0-1 in Mountain West play. From the start, head coach Jay Norvell has spoken with confidence about the talent level of the team and his belief in what they can achieve. It is a message the players have echoed with confidence.

What the Rams haven't done is play consistently at any point of the season. The team may rank in the top five nationally in passing, but each game has featured droughts where they haven't moved the ball. A defense which entered the season feeling it was only getting better is now prone to giving up chunk plays.

"You've just got to be ready to pour it all on the line every Saturday. That's easy to say, but as you go through the season, you have to prepare, and you have to do a good job of preparing," Norvell said. "But also, you have to prepare to pour it all out on the line. That was a physical game Saturday night; you can say what you want. Both teams played very hard and very physical, and a lot of guys put a lot on the line out there. Along with that physicality, you've got to play smart. We had some players do that and some players not.

"The other thing I told our kids was, as you move through a season, you're going to have parts of your team that maybe aren't playing great some nights. You have to be able to overcome it with other parts. We have enough veteran players who have played that can pick up the slack when we need that, and that's what a team is. We're not always going to play great on defense, we're not always going to play great on offense, but we have to be able to pick each other up when we need that shot in the arm. We had our chances Saturday in the second half. It was a tie ball game at halftime, and we didn't come out strong in the third quarter. We're good enough to do that. We just have to learn when we have those situations we need to respond."
Saturday's game could be the most disappointing one so far, combining the start with the finish. The lack of a response as Utah State started to rally didn't exist. That was troubling to Norvell immediately after the result.

But one game can be an outlier if the team comes together. That's their approach with Boise State coming to town this Saturday.

When they came together again the next day, nobody was happy. No one was detached from the mission, either.

"For us, we're lifting on Sunday, so during that, it's just being positive," tight end Dallin Hoker said. "We're all talking about the game, things we could have done better. We don't lose belief in our team after one game. We've had this belief. It starts in the winter when we have our workouts. It takes a lot, and we keep staying positive no matter what happens."

Piece by piece, the Rams are looking for fixes. Henderson can compartmentalize the thought, seeing what's taken place on the offensive line. A season after the unit led the nation in sacks allowed, the Rams have yielded just seven, a number they gave up in a game in 2022.

That group, with new pieces, came together and learned to play as one. It's a development he believes can spread.

"I think as a team we've come a long way, and we still have a long way to go. As far as sticking together and finding that missing piece, I think that missing piece will be something that happens soon and we'll continue to ride on," he said. "That has to start now. In practice, in meetings. It has to start when we're at home, from when we make up to go to meetings, to practice, even through walkthroughs. We have to have that mindset that we're going to figure out what happened, what went wrong and we're going to eliminate it, and throughout the season, we'll get better and better."

Norvell is dealing with a bunch of 18-22-year olds, and he's not the first adult to admit he's never quite sure what's going through their brains at any given moment and exactly how they'll respond to anything, positive or negative.

What he does know is a mental adjustment can make a world of difference, and it's easier to get there if a team holds firm. The Rams have not lost the belief, and the adjustment will be required to beat a team like Boise State, a program it has never defeated.

"You just have to have a group of guys who make their mind up they want to go win," Norvell said. "It's really that simple. We have to be that team this week."

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