{"id":258791,"date":"2025-08-03T15:14:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-03T15:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/258791\/"},"modified":"2025-08-03T15:14:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-03T15:14:10","slug":"csu-rams-football-on-track-for-best-recruiting-class-in-16-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/258791\/","title":{"rendered":"CSU Rams football on track for best recruiting class in 16 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

FORT COLLINS \u2014 The buck starts here. Alex Collins told me he knew of seven to 10 <\/a>CSU football players approached by a Power 4 school this past spring, enticed by careless whispers and the usual blarney<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Rams kept all but two.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some kids that are trying to get through college and make every single dollar that they can,\u201d Collins, the new general manager for the Rams\u2019 football program, said Friday as we sat in his office at Canvas Stadium.<\/a> \u201cThey\u2019ll transfer seven times. They don\u2019t care if it gets them more money.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd there are some kids who felt uncomfortable getting paid. (They\u2019ll say), \u2018I\u2019m not trying to get paid.\u2019 I\u2019ll (say), \u2018I don\u2019t care what you\u2019re trying to do. If you\u2019re a starter on this team, I\u2019m not going to let you do that for nothing.\u2019 And so it\u2019s breaking those walls and barriers down. Hey, if you come up and tell me that a Power 4 school offered you money. I\u2019m not going to take that in a bad light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collins shrugged. He\u2019s a sunny pragmatist from Wisconsin with two USC degrees. Friday marked the start of his first preseason camp in FoCo,<\/a> having been hired from Ole Miss this past January to, as the official Rams website put it, oversee \u201cthe recruiting efforts and roster personnel for the CSU football program.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

So far, so good. As of Aug. 1, the Rams\u2019 2026 class was ranked fourth by the 247Sports composite<\/a> among future Pac-12 members. It also checked in at No. 69 nationally. If that number holds through next winter, it\u2019ll be the highest-ranked Rams haul since 2010 (68th).<\/p>\n

According to the site, three-star safety Jermaine Santana-Diaz of Missouri City, Texas, and 3-star wideout Devin Hamilton of Hoschton, Ga., are the seventh- and ninth-best prep recruits, respectively, that CSU\u2019s landed over the last 25 years.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAlex is a really experienced guy. (When you) look at positions to bring in, you always look at where people are, where they\u2019re coming from, and can they bring things that maybe we haven\u2019t experienced,\u201d coach Jay Norvell said. \u201cSo Alex is one of those guys \u2014 he was in the SEC for five years; he was at Ole Miss, he was at a very creative team recruiting and a very creative team (on) the NIL (front), so he saw a lot of different experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Never feel good about your room\u2019<\/p>\n

With Collins settling in, CSU\u2019s put down the butter knife and nudged closer to the cutting edge. General managers are the new hot thing in college football, although the job description and responsibilities vary by school.<\/p>\n

At Stanford, GM Andrew Luck sits above the coach on the program\u2019s organizational chart, effectively serving as an assistant athletic director for Cardinal football. At CSU, Collins reports to Norvell as something more like an assistant coach in charge of contracts.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the way I kind of look at it is Coach (Norvell) didn\u2019t want to deal with the money side of things; he didn\u2019t want to get caught up in negotiations,\u201d Collins explained. \u201cI think in the grand scheme of things, it\u2019s good to have someone that\u2019s separate.\u201d<\/p>\n

His peers concur. Of the eight football programs that will comprise the Pac-12 in 2026, six already have general managers on their respective staffs. And the two that don\u2019t, Oregon State and Utah State, list fairly close equivalencies among their support crew.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hard part (was) when I told our coaches this \u2014 I said, \u2018Never feel good about your team, never feel good about your room.\u2019 Because that\u2019s how it used to be,\u201d Collins explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen CSU used to sign an NFL draft pick out of high school, you probably watched them the first day of fall camp and you went, \u2018Dang, they\u2019ve got this guy for three more years or four more years?\u2019 (Now) you get on a player, (you) might have him for a year, might have him for two, might have him for three.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collins spent most of the last decade working for Lane Kiffin. Lordy, he\u2019s seen some stuff. He also injected some Kiffinisms into the Rams\u2019 collective recruiting ethos. The new GM asked each of the CSU assistants, for example, to cite the three most vital traits required for their position groups. Collins then reset his recruiting database accordingly to match their wants.<\/p>\n

When it came to the transfer portal, Collins\u2019 new litmus test for the Rams proved a monument to common sense. He\u2019d ring up the position coach from a potential transfer\u2019s old school and ask, simply, \u201cWould you take him back?\u201d If the answer\u2019s \u201cNo,\u201d you move on.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there a shot every year that our top players are going to get skimmed? Sure,\u201d Collins said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re trying to (adapt) a lot in how we do things, how we structure it, to lower that number and prevent it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never want to lose a single player. Then it becomes, OK, if we\u2019re constantly going to lose at the top, we\u2019ve got to raise our bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Jay wants to finish his career here\u2019<\/p>\n

Since July 1, universities have been able to pay student-athletes via revenue sharing, thanks to the historic House vs. NCAA ruling. Collins has since served as one of CSU\u2019s primary points of contact for Name\/Image\/Likeness (NIL) deals, player contract negotiations and financial packages.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got high school kids on official visits, and that meeting between the dad, the kid, the agent, the GM, whoever\u2019s in that room, is a 45-minute cuss-fest,\u201d Collins said. \u201cIf you\u2019re on your high school visit and you\u2019re going, \u2018If we don\u2019t get $30,000 more, we\u2019re not coming here,\u2019 how does that set you up to be there for the next three or four years?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where I think, for us, you\u2019ve got to have a little bit of a retention mindset first. Any in-state kid in my mind instantly goes up \u2014 you\u2019re an hour from home here, you\u2019re going to want to stay here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rams will never be college football\u2019s Dodgers or Yankees. Yet Collins, Cheesehead to the last, keeps asking himself this question: Why can\u2019t we be the Brewers?<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you were Lane Kiffin at FAU, everyone probably could\u2019ve seen \u2014 \u2018OK, he ain\u2019t trying to stay here,’\u201d Collins said.<\/p>\n

\u201cJay wants to finish his career here. He loves it here. He\u2019s very happy here. So you can trust him, and therefore me, that you\u2019re making long-term decisions about how you spend the money. We\u2019re not trying to burn this down to go somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rams have offered 17 Colorado prep footballers in the Class of \u201926. There are at least six more out for \u201927. CSU hasn\u2019t locked every gate. But at least the wolves are going to have to work for it.<\/p>\n

Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver\u2019s teams.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT COLLINS \u2014 The buck starts here. Alex Collins told me he knew of seven to 10 CSU…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6502,318,331,339,6872,37956,6871,4092,50988,50989,7,50990,26226,1564,929,1684,49,48,6,15,9609,683,2712,6091,14839,14845,5295,326,9,2833,3671,51,9653,1599,991],"class_list":{"0":"post-258791","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-andrew-luck","9":"tag-college","10":"tag-college-football","11":"tag-college-sports","12":"tag-colorado-state","13":"tag-colorado-state-football","14":"tag-colorado-state-rams","15":"tag-contract","16":"tag-csu","17":"tag-csu-rams","18":"tag-football","19":"tag-fort-collins","20":"tag-jay-norvell","21":"tag-lane-kiffin","22":"tag-latest-headlines","23":"tag-missouri","24":"tag-ncaa","25":"tag-ncaa-football","26":"tag-nfl","27":"tag-nfl-draft","28":"tag-nil","29":"tag-oregon","30":"tag-oregon-state","31":"tag-pac-12","32":"tag-prep-football","33":"tag-preps","34":"tag-sean-keeler","35":"tag-sec","36":"tag-sports","37":"tag-sports-columnists","38":"tag-spring","39":"tag-texas","40":"tag-usc","41":"tag-utah","42":"tag-wisconsin"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114965490126435107","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}