Jay Norvell didn’t sound so much like he was surrendering the wheel as scooching over a little in order to share it.
“I’m a head coach that is very involved in the offense. And I call plays,” Norvell, the CSU Rams’ football coach, told me during a visit to Denver early Monday evening. “And that’s been good to us. And so, we’ll just kind of see where that goes.”
Last month, CSU announced that Matt Mumme had shifted to “passing-game coordinator.” Meanwhile, offensive line coach Bill Best, another longtime Norvell lieutenant, just added “run-game coordinator” to his job title.
On paper, it sounds an awful lot like two play-callers on offense instead of one. Or maybe three instead of one.
“Why divvy it up this way?” I asked.
“Because those guys are senior guys. And I trust them,” Norvell replied. “Bill has a great eye for the run game. Obviously, Matt has been a passing expert in our program for many years. And I trust both of them. And so, we have an unusual situation.”
To say the least. The Rams are coming off an 8-5 season, their best in nine years, yet some of the natives remain restless.
A team that wound up tied for second in the Mountain West became something of a green and gold Rorschach test. On one hand, CSU went 6-1 in league play. On the other, the league wasn’t much to write home about after Boise State (12-2) and UNLV (11-3). On one hand, the Rams went 6-1 at Canvas Stadium. On the other, they went 1-3 against teams that finished with a winning record. One one hand, CSU won at Air Force for the first time since 2002 and swept its rivalry games with the Falcons and Wyoming in the same season for the first time since 2015. On the other, the Zoomies went 5-7 and the Cowboys posted their worst record in a decade.
Yet CSU is hitting spring ball with 13 new staff members, the kind of tweaking you normally see on a staff after 4-8, not 8-5. Norvell told me the moves were made with an eye to the future — not the past. The jump from the Mountain West to the new-look Pac-12 is coming in July 2026, and Norvell said the offseason’s shifting has been with that transition firmly in mind.
“Because I felt like it needed to happen, was the reason why,” the coach explained. “Moving forward, I just had a difference of philosophy. And so (with) adjustments, in-game adjustments and the philosophy — I just didn’t see us moving forward. And so, it’s really that simple. There’s no other magic to it.”
Old friend Tyson Summers is back as defensive coordinator; Freddie Banks is out. Norvell hired Alex Collins as general manager from Ole Miss to handle transfer portal and roster management. They hired ex-Steelers GM Kevin Colbert as a consultant.
“I think the term general manager is kind of a loose term. In professional sports, it means a little bit different,” Norvell said. “This is a more narrow space, where our general manager is in charge of our personnel acquirement and talks to kids about NIL and also looks at our overall NIL budget and helps manage that.
“There are a lot of conversations that go on with that in college football right now. You’ve got a lot of people involved. You’ve got agents involved. You’ve got parents involved. You’ve got kids involved. You’ve got Uncle Tony who’s involved. So there (are) a lot of people that are involved in it. And so those conversations are had by our general manager.
“I want to coach. (Steelers coach) Mike Tomlin doesn’t talk to his players about contracts. And I don’t want to do that either.”
Norvell wants a defense that’s faster and more disruptive. As for the offense, well …
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I mean, we’ve been working together a long time, right? Matt’s been with me for eight years, and Bill’s been with me a long time.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen on game day yet. It’s too early to say. And we need to go see what we have with the team. And there are a lot of things that need to happen before then.”
Norvell said the changes were self-scouted, not forced upon him. The Rams in 2024 played far more complimentary football than the year before. Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi cut down on his turnovers, which was good, but also his explosive plays.
“I was calling plays when we won (with Nevada) in Fort Collins, and they called me a week later to hire me as a coach,” Norvell said. “I believe in players. And I believe a football team needs to do what its players are strong at doing. Last year, we had a veteran offensive line … I felt like we needed to support our defense with how we played offense.
“And so you can affect how your defense plays by the way you play offense. A lot of people don’t know that. A lot of people that watch football and write about football don’t know that.
“I’ve said it several times: You’ve got to be able to have different formulas and find ways to win with the personnel that you have. And that’s just football. So I’m not going to apologize for what we did because I felt like we needed to do it to win games. And you’re never going to make everybody happy, right?”
Not a chance.