Strike 3: Colorado State head football coach Jay Norvell is heading down a risky path.
Already without an offensive coordinator and handling the play calling himself, Norvell fired popular defensive coordinator Freddie Banks shortly after the Rams 8-4 regular season concluded. In explaining the move to the media, Norvell said as the head coach, he didn’t want to “rent out areas of my team to coaches. It’s not the special teams coach’s special teams. It’s not the defensive coach’s defense. It’s the Rams defense.
“I’m the head coach, I’m ultimately responsible for what we do and how we do it. I’m looking for somebody who understands that.”
Insiders say that Norvell and Banks had verbal clashes during practice, and it’s pretty clear from the head coach’s comments that he and Banks didn’t see eye-to-eye. There was no “it’s not you, it’s me” sort of vibe involved in this dismissal.
For the record, statistically speaking, CSU’s defense was one of the better ones in the conference, finishing third in the Mountain West behind conference champ Boise State and runner up UNLV by giving up a touch over 22 point per game. With Norvell calling the plays, the offense ranked seventh in the same category.
Norvell made a slow but dramatic switch in offensive philosophies this season, shifting away from his preferred “Air Raid” pass-heavy attack to a more ground based, ball (and clock) control approach. Reports say that the move was made in large part to limit the exposure of the defense that struggled in 2023. The result was the Rams sometimes being hard to watch on offense, but showing the ability to make the plays they had to in order to post their first winning record since 2017 – and their best overall record in a decade.
The timing for Bank’s dismissal is odd, given that CSU still has a bowl game to play against Miami of Ohio in a couple of weeks. It tells you that Norvell could not co-exist for another day with this defensive coordinator.
The question is now, can the head coach co-exist with any assistant who has even slightly differing views of things?
This is where things get dangerous. Norvell has a choice to make, and he’d better be right.
There are two schools of thought on assistant coaches: There’s Norvell’s “my way or the highway” approach, or the idea that more of a groupthink will produce the best results.
Deion Sanders (like Norvell, a former defensive back in his playing days) for one, has brought in former head coaches to run his offenses at CU. He’s clearly not threatened by having someone with a proven pedigree around who may have a differing viewpoint on how to attack an opponent. Nebraska’s Matt Rhule did the same thing late in the season, handing the keys to his team’s offense over to former successful head coach Dana Holgerson.
When a head coach surrounds himself with only “yes” men – like Mike Shanahan did towards the end of his days in Denver – that head coach had better be right. If he’s dismissing any and all contrary opinions, he’s severely limiting himself and his team’s prospects for finding the best solution.
This could be a case where Norvell and Banks, who’d been together for three seasons in Fort Collins, could no longer work with each other. But given his refusal to give up his play calling duties while trying to manage the sideline during a game, it certainly appears that Norvell wants everything on both sides of the ball to rest on his shoulders.
He’s putting himself in the cross hairs. There aren’t any more coordinators to fire.
