LAS VEGAS — Colorado State head football coach Jim McElwain bristled.
“We don’t have a niche,” the second year man said at Mountain West media days, his Rams coming off one of the best seasons since Fort Collins legend Sonny Lubick retired.
No, Jim McElwain clarified, he’s got a football team. A good one, with perhaps the best quarterback in the Mountain Division — Garrett Grayson — returning for his senior season.
But McElwain’s club has something more important than talent, which in a “have-not” conference now nearing full parity, can be as fleeting as its fickle fan base on the front range: a proven system.
It produced one of the most prodigious offensive seasons in program history, and figures to be a mainstay for a coach who is seemingly and surprisingly more comfortable in the sandals and craft beer environs of Fort Collins than the live-and-breathe-Alabama-football milieu of Tuscaloosa.
Maybe it’s happy talk, but McElwain made it clear he intends to stick around and build, developing the new CSU prototype.
It’s happening across the conference, programs getting behind coaches who’ve established systems that reflect their personality, geographic and resource realities.
Perfectly named San Diego State’s Rocky Long, as gritty as sandpaper, said he won’t even recruit a player if he mentions the beach lifestyle to a coach. His team won eight of the ugliest games in the conference last year, three in overtime.
Long was given an extension, turning down a pay raise so San Diego State could reinvest in facilities and assistant coach retention.
That’s stability, the likeliest path to sustained success, with the Aztecs looking to make a fifth straight bowl game.
UNLV’s patience in fifth-year head coach Bobby Hauck was rewarded with a breakout seven-win season, and Hauck was rewarded with a contract extension. As was Fresno State’s Tim DeRuyter, who was rumored to have turned down more prominent jobs to continue to raid the sunny skies of the west division, even without a guarantee of finding the next Derek Carr.
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