FORT COLLINS — As Colorado State practices on the fields adjacent to Moby Arena getting ready for its Friday opener against Colorado in Denver, the upper reaches of the under-construction on-campus stadium and cranes are visible to the southeast.
Barring unforeseen delays, the stadium opening is only a year away, in time for the 2017 season, which would be Mike Bobo’s third as the Rams’ head coach.
Things have a way of changing fast in college football (right, Jim McElwain?), but Bobo continues to speak of long-range views for the CSU program. After his tenure as a player, graduate assistant and assistant at Georgia — a tenure broken up for one only season at Jacksonville State in Alabama — he still is settling in as a head coach heading into year two, and even getting used to wearing something other than red.
“I don’t think you ever feel totally comfortable,” Bobo said last week. “To be honest, you’ve got the team, you’ve got the coaches, you’ve got your families, you worry about every little thing every day and making sure you’re covering every detail. And then at the same time, letting guys take over for their responsibilities. You delegate and let them handle it.
“As a player, you were excited to go out there and play. As a coach, you worry about every little thing and the games are agony. Every part of it. I enjoy the locker room when we win, but you worry about every little detail, making sure you’ve covered. There are a lot of decisions as a head coach I’ve never had to think about before.”
Before becoming a head coach, Bobo recalled watching games on television and wondering how he would handle certain situations as a head coach.
“I’m going to make some mistakes,” he said. “We’ll address it and we’ll move on.”
One major adjustment he’s had to make is reconfiguring parameters of talent evaluation for a Mountain West school after so many years in the Southeastern Conference.
“One year definitely helps,” Bobo said. “One year of playing guys, of being able to see their personnel in person, and not just on tape. One year of recruiting the similar type of player, recruiting against guys. I think in three, four years, I’ll have a real good feel of it. I’m recruiting you, but I don’t get you and (you) go Boise State. It’s, ‘I remember this kid, I remember his strengths, I remember his weaknesses.
“A lot of these kids, I don’t know what they were like in high school. When I was in the SEC for a long time, it wasn’t just playing against those guys, but it was also recruiting them and remembering them from high school, what he was like, what kind of body frame he had, what were his positives in his skill-set and what we thought he needed to work at. So it’s all of that over time, and getting to know different coaches. ‘I remember this coach from this school and now he’s at this school and he ran this back in 2007.’ I don’t have any of that. I have one year of playing eight conference games, so that will take a bit of time.”
The Rams were 7-6 under Bobo a year ago, opening with a rout of Savannah State and then losing consecutive games in overtime to Minnesota at Hughes Stadium and Colorado in Denver. The Rocky Mountain Showdown is the opener this time.
The loss a year ago came in wrenching fashion, with the Rams having a 27-yard field goal attempt blocked in overtime before CU’s Diego Gonzalez made a 32-yarder to win the game.
“Losing is bad for team morale,” Bobo said. “We lost two games in a row in overtime and that’s our job as a football coach — as head football coach, assistant football coach of our football team — to rally the troops and be resilient and come back and realize you have a long season. You preach that, but still, to 18-to-22-year-olds, when you lose something, it’s crushing. And coaches sometimes, too. We take losses harder and it’s coming back to refocus. It took us a little while.
“I mean, you have to give credit to the teams that beat us, too. We played some good football teams after the CU game, and it just took us a while to find our groove. It’s one game, OK? It’s an important game. It’s an in-state game. It means something to everybody in this state. It means something to our players. It’s just like Game 2 (against Texas-San Antonio) is going to be.”
Bobo said that his parents, George and Barbara, are traveling in from Georgia in the upcoming week, arriving in time for the Showdown, and are planning to stay for a couple months. George is a retired highly successful high school coach in Georgia who had to abandon his beloved triple-option offense when a junior starting quarterback was better suited for throwing the ball than running.
A kid named Mike.
Bobo said that his dad has come around to the appropriateness of his son not coaching option football.
“He’ll say every once in a while, ‘You need to run the fullback,’ ” Mike Bobo said. “But I’m like, ‘No … he’s a guard.’ ”