Jack Howell opens up on Colorado State learning from past mistakes: "We want to own them"

The 2024 season kicks off on Friday with the start of fall camp. 

Going into year three of the Norvell era, there is hope that Colorado State will end a six-year bowl drought and potentially play a factor in the league for the first time since Nick Stevens was under center. 

CSU came close to reaching a bowl game in 2023. Had a handful of plays gone differently in two or three key games, the Rams very easily could have been a seven-win team. But as some of the veteran leaders recently explained at Media Days out in Las Vegas, the lights were a little too bright for a group that came close to accomplishing its goals but came up short in the end. 

“When you look at last year, you have three games specifically that stand out, CU, UNLV and Hawaii,” Jack Howell told DNVR. 

Howell continued, explaining how brutal it was for the team to blow the game in Boulder in the last 2 minutes of regulation before ultimately losing in double overtime. 

He brought up the excruciating fashion in which the Rams were taken down with walk-off field goals in Las Vegas and Honolulu after looking like they were in position to win. 

As tough as those losses were to stomach, and they went down a lot like chunky milk, the fourth-year safety doesn’t want to block out the experiences or try to forget them. According to Howell, they’re important learning moments for what happens when a team does not keep its composure for a full 60 minutes. 

“It’s just being a team that’s been there and being experienced,” Howell said of CSU being able to learn from past mistakes. 

“A lot of teams panic in those situations. And I think we did that a little bit. And, you know, I don’t think that’s a bad thing to say. A lot of the time people try to cover up their mistakes, and we don’t want to do that. We want to own them.”

Howell explained that across the board, offensively, defensively, the Rams let their foot off the gas and panicked a little bit when things got tight. “Ultimately that’s what caused us to lose,” he said. 

“We’ve got a lot of captains, experienced captains on this team. We’ve been playing together for three to four years, and you know, having that experience will be huge.”

Tory Horton echoed Howell’s sentiments, explaining that the team had to take a hard look in the mirror and really reflect on the ways they can be better.

“It’s just like, where did we slip up? What did we do wrong? And that’s what we took into consideration, like what do we need to take away from this so this doesn’t happen?”

The fifth-year wide receiver explained that complacency may have set in at times during previous seasons. The guys in the locker room are approaching things with a different level of intensity this time around though. Whether it’s spending extra time in the film room or getting up additional reps in the weight room, people are showing a clear desire to make the 2024 season different. 

“No complacency is something that we emphasize a lot,” Horton said. “Because we don’t want that feeling of going down like that, on the last play, the last possession. We all understand the motive because we all had to go through that feeling.”

In addition to a favorable schedule that features seven home games and eight programs with coaches in their first year, if you’re looking for a reason to believe the Rams will finally turn the corner it’s that despite having very little success in recent years, the program has been able to retain its biggest stars. 

Guys like Jack Howell, Tory Horton, Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi, even Henry Blackburn electing to return for a fifth year, CSU has been able to keep the core of the team intact through some pretty challenging times. And when you look at what’s happening with most teams across the country right now, that’s really not a very common occurrence. 

If you ask the players why they’ve chosen to stick around instead of pursuing other opportunities in the transfer portal, they all credit Norvell and the staff. 

“It’s a testament to who we are as a football team,” Howell said, before adding that while there have been a few departures here and there, the guys that have chosen to stay are wholeheartedly committed to turning things around together. 

“We’re gonna roll with who wants to be at CSU. And I’d rather have a guy who is a no-name who wants to be at CSU really bad than a big-name guy who’s kind of half in, half out. We’ve known people who didn’t necessarily want to be here, had one foot in and one foot out. We were glad about that. No disrespect to them, love some of those guys that left, but we play with who we’ve got, and who we’ve got is who wants to be here.”

With one month until the Rams open up the 2024 campaign against a Texas squad that is projected to contend for the national championship and roughly six weeks until the Buffs come to Fort Collins for the first time since 1996, we’ll learn a lot about this team in the first month of the season. 

Get ready for football, folks. It’s finally here.