The message is clear — the Rams still have work to do

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Colorado State football continued its preparation for the upcoming 2020 football season over the weekend by holding the first team scrimmage of the Steve Addazio era. 

There was no viewing period or media availability following training camp on Friday or Saturday’s scrimmage. However, a transcript of quotes from Addazio, as well as a couple of veteran players, was released to local reporters from CSU’s associate athletic director for communications Kyle Neaves. 

Here’s what we know. 

Addazio said on Friday that although he was not the one to officially break the news that CSU will be hosting New Mexico in Week 1, he believes that it matters for guys to know who they are playing. “I’m quite confident our kids were excited to know who we are playing, that we’re working towards something.”

With that in mind, Addazio also said that he was looking for his team to come out on Saturday with great competitiveness, a tremendous will to win, great fundamentals, and as high a level of execution as possible. “Overall, I want to see a group of guys playing really hard,” Addazio said on Friday. 

Playing at half speed or even 75 percent is a good way to get killed on the gridiron — so it makes sense that Addazio was looking for intensity from his players. And based on what Addazio told Neaves on Saturday, there was a relatively good effort and attitude in the scrimmage. That said, the tackling on defense is not where it needs to be. Neither is the mindset of the whole team. 

“This is a new normal,” Addazio said. “Normally you worry about how much tackling you’re doing, but we’ve got to tackle, play football, and get tougher. We’ve got to be able to gain a couple yards when you have to run it for a couple of yards. We’ve just got to get that mentality.” 

The tricky part for Addazio and Co., though, is that while they are trying to get everyone conditioned to contact, prepped for their opponents, and create the type of killer mentality that allows teams to pull through in difficult situations, they are also trying to install new systems on both sides of the ball. 

“We’re not where we want to be. We’re just not there yet,” Addazio said. “I don’t know how many days we’ve had in pads, but it just doesn’t work like that. We’ve got another week of camp coming up. In that week, we’ve got to have some real tough practices and scrimmages, and we’ve got to grind this thing out and raise our level of play.” 

“We still have work to do,” senior cornerback Marshaun Cameron added. “The effort is there, but there are still some corrections to do with plays and missed assignments. Once we get those fixed, we’ll be at the top.” 

Trey McBride was more optimistic, stating that he likes where the squad is at right now. He pointed out that they need to get in better condition so that the team can play faster. But what’s encouraging is McBride believes that once the Rams start executing at a faster pace, they will be a difficult team to stop. 

While it’s clear that the Rams still have quite a bit of room for improvement, as Addazio pointed out, we are still early in the process. The Rams will scrimmage multiple times before they have to play the Lobos in three weeks — so there’s no reason to panic just yet — especially with a roster stacked with veteran players. 

“It’s one down. It’s the first one. We’ve got to have three more or so,” Addazio said. “Thank God we got out of here without any significant injuries. We’ve been grinding pretty hard. We’ve  had a long stretch of practices, and they’ve all been physical. Today was a day that, for the first time out, we exposed a lot of our issues and now we’ve got to go back and work on them.”

The clock is ticking. We’ll see how the Rams respond.