What We Saw: Everything Up for Reevaluation

FORT COLLINS – Create four turnovers, give up five.

Collect six sacks but give up eight explosive plays in the passing game, five more in the run game and allow five scoring plays of 20 yards or longer. Saturday night, the scales were tipped heavily in Colorado State's favor early on, but then Utah State overcorrected in a major way to post a 44-24 victory.

Colorado State head coach Jay Norvell was asked about the pass defense, but his response covered every aspect of his squad's performance.

"That's very uncharacteristic for us. We've got to really look at what we're doing and who we're doing it with, and those guys have to be accountable for their play," Norvell said. "We have to own this performance. We did not play well at all in the second half. That's on us, and we've got to look at the film and the kids that were in there have to take responsibility for their play in the second half."

An offense which had appeared to get in step, particularly throwing the ball, was out of synch. A defense coming off two strong second-half performances was down and out the final three quarters of the game. The Rams had a 17-0 lead before six minutes had expired in the game, but scored just once more, that coming in the fourth quarter after Utah State had scored 37 unanswered points.

Following such a performance, everything is on the table and under the microscope.

"You talk about not letting it get to you, go on to the next play. Tonight, we didn't do that," said safety Jack Howell, who had nine tackles and recovered a fumble. "We kinda hung our heads. The offense wasn't feeding off the defense, the defense wasn't feeding off the offense. We were trying to play separate out there, and you can't win football games like that."

Step Back

Colorado State entered the game third in the nation in passing offense and Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi was on a bit of a run, averaging nearly 340 yards per game in his three starts by hitting a high percentage of his passes. A redshirt freshman, the one downside was protecting the ball (he'd thrown seven interceptions with 11 scoring passes).

He didn't look the same Saturday. His passes were off the mark, sailing high or behind. He threw three interceptions and lost a fumble before the end of the night as he connected on just 26 of his 57 tosses, which are the third most attempts in a game by a Colorado State quarterback, finishing with 225 yards.

Norvell said they planned to see some new things moving forward, which started against the Aggies. Part of the maturation process at the position is adjusting when seeing different coverage schemes the first time.

"He wasn't moving his feet in the first half. When you don't take your footwork and drop in the pocket, you don't read the coverage properly, and that's what he was doing," Norvell said. "He was kinda rushing a little bit. They played some different coverages that made him hold the ball a little bit, and we knew we were going to see that because we had hurt people with man coverage, so we were going to see some changeups.

"Telling a kid what's getting ready to happen and having him experience it are two different things. That's one of the things we have to work through with a young guy. We have to try to help him the best we can, and other guys have to rally around him, and we really didn't do that tonight."

The Rams aren't going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They expected ups and downs, which they'd witnessed firsthand in each of his four starts. Saturday's performance was the first where the ups never came

Ball security has to become a priority, and in time, they expect it to greatly improve. His ability to make plays has come with a few consequences as he learns.

"Everybody on the team has confidence in him. He's a young player, and he's a little gung-ho sometimes, and most of the time that benefits us," center Jacob Gardner said. "Occasionally, things don't work out the way we want them to, and that's the nature of the beast of having someone so young at QB. We all have faith in him, and as an offense we all need to rally around him and support him."

Better, Not Complete

The game's fast start was attributed primarily to the play of Colorado State's special teams. The first points came after Paddy Turner's rugby punt hit an Aggie downfield, the muff recovered by Henry Blacburn. That led to Jordon Noyes' 30-yard field goal when the offense didn't move.

It became a 10-0 lead when Tory Horton returned a punt 79-yards for a touchdown, his second scoring return for the Rams. Turner averaged 44.0 on the night with two kicks going for better than 50 yards, downing a pair inside the 20.

But late in the game, a roughing-the-kicker call on a USU punt gave the Aggies the ball back and a play later they scored on a 48-yard run.

"We did a lot of good things on teams. Tory got hurt in the second half, it affected our return game a little bit," Norvell said. "I thought (Louis Brown IV) could have run north and south a little bit more on those returns and not sideways. We felt we needed to go for a block at the end and we had a couple of young kids run into the punter; that's not something we weren't trying to do.

"It's just part of being able to play off each other, and we certainly can play better on teams."

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