Football is back and it feels great to get back into the in-season routine. Like last year, I’ll be running you all through our upcoming opponent’s defense on a weekly basis to prep for Saturday (or sometimes Friday).
To kick off the 2025 UW Football season, the Huskies are hosting the Colorado State Rams. In my cursory research, I couldn’t find anything that suggests we’ve ever played against CSU, and like our shared history, there isn’t much for me to go off of when it comes to figuring out what their defense will look like. After a solid 8-5 record last season, the Rams faced a significant re-tooling on the defensive side of the ball during the offseason. DC Freddie Banks was relieved of his duties following the 2024 season and was replaced by Western Kentucky DC Tyson Summers. Additionally, like many G5 programs, the Transfer Portal came calling for many of their defensive leaders including leading tackler LB Buom Jock and top pass rusher DL Gabe Kirschke. While there’s a lot of turnover on the defense to sift through, there appear to be enough remaining holdovers and Portal additions that the Huskies will face a good test in Week 1.
The Scheme & Personnel
Starting from the top, new DC Tyson Summers seems like a solid choice to rebuild the Rams’ defense. The three-time Broyles Award nominee has a track record of producing solid defenses at otherwise undermanned programs. His two most recent nominations were in 2022 and 2024 during his time as Western Kentucky’s defensive coordinator where the Hilltoppers consistently outperformed their Conference USA billing through player development rather than talent acquisition.
Schematically, Summers brings a version of the 3-3-5 defense to Fort Collins where the lighter nickel personnel is presented in a 4-down, Even front look in most situations instead of the conventional 3-3-5 Stack variation. The Rams primarily ran an Even front last year, so it should be familiar for most of the holdovers. What’s unique about Summers defense is how many different looks he throws at opposing offenses up front. Summers is an aggressive play caller who will throw the kitchen sink at opponents while trying to maintain relatively safe zone coverage structures. He won’t dial up many Cover 0 or 6-man blitzes, but he’ll try to generate pressure through deception and confusion by shifting, spreading, slanting, and stunting his linemen and bringing a 4th or 5th rusher from different angles.
This approach led to a high havoc rate that also happened to be boom-or-bust when it came to run defense. The Hilltoppers gave up over 3000 yards on the ground last year with 7 games allowing over 200 yards and 4 games allowing over 300 yards. Liberty even ran for 400+ against them in 2024. That should concern Rams fans given that a leaky run defense was one of their biggest gripes with the old defensive staff, and that was before they lost their top two tacklers from last year’s team.
Fortunately, CSU added significant reinforcements in the Portal to shore up the defensive front. Iowa State LB transfer Jacob Ellis has been tapped to fill the void at ILB, and defensive linemen Gabe Jones (New Mexico State), Paul Tangelo (Saint Francis), and Moso Tuitele (New Mexico) add experienced depth on a defensive front that is pretty large for a G5 program. With a defensive interior stocked with 300+ lb linemen and solidly built EDGE players rivaling UW’s in size, it’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to bulldoze the Rams up front.
In the secondary, CB Jahari Rogers (formerly of SMU) and safety Jake Jarmolowich (Holy Cross) add veteran playmaking ability to a group that already included former Stanford/WSU starter Ayden Hector. The overhauled group has proven production, but there are still questions about overall team speed and group cohesiveness given the number of new starters.
Keys to the Game
If I were the offensive staff, I wouldn’t take this game lightly (we all know how that can turn out in a season opener), but I would still want to use this opportunity test out the overhauled offense. Against an aggressive, blitz-heavy defense, the last thing that our offense will want to do is to allow the defense to seize situational control. We want to keep the defense off balance and to dictate terms on a down-to-down basis by staying ahead of the sticks.
The obvious approach would be to lean on the run game. Jonah Coleman is the best known quantity on offense, but with a revamped line, it’d be a stretch to assume that we’d be able to run Mid Zone 50 times to victory. With that being said, I think our Zone run game should be the foundation of our offensive game plan. Fisch had leaned on Mid Zone schemes last season to get movement upfront while leaning on Coleman’s vision and agility to hit cutback lanes for big gains. That strategy might be an effective counter to the Rams’ active and varied fronts where we have better flexibility to adjust to their different looks while simultaneously stressing their questionable gap integrity.
Layered on top of that foundation, we should be on the lookout for ways the staff will manipulate the LBs. With an almost entirely rebuilt LB rotation, the defensive second level is a big question mark that we should attack early. Summers’ run fits often ask a lot of their LBs to make plays and to cover a lot of ground, which also puts them in conflict a lot. Motion, shifts, and constraint plays like RPOs, option concepts, and screens force LBs to think on the fly, leaving them susceptible to missed run fits and blown coverages. Even proper diagnosis of the plays by saavy LBs can leave them playing a step behind the offense.
Finally, we should leverage our team speed. If our roster is where the staff thinks it is in their build, we should have a noticeable advantage in this department. They might have a few guys who can keep up, and they can use zone coverages to bracket our top guys like Denzel Boston, but we should have the depth of talent at the skill positions to win the match up game. Not to mention, with Demond Williams posing a massive threat as a runner, CSU will want to keep a spy or stay in conventional spot drop zone coverages for the majority of the game to limit scrambles. Zone coverages are susceptible to passing game mismatches because defenses aren’t designed to travel with motion/shifts. If they call a zone coverage, the CB will take the outside receiver whoever that is. Imagine if we flexed DeGraaf and Coleman out to one side with Boston or a speedster like Raiden Vines-Bright at the WR3 slot against a LB. Even something as simple as a swing screen to Jordan Washington out of the backfield could force a much slower LB into space where Washington’s 10.3 100m speed could be deadly.
Long story short, I think we have all the pieces to get the best of a solid but flawed Rams defense. I’m not expecting us to have so large of a talent advantage, or execute well enough in our season opener, to run away from CSU while calling a vanilla game. If that’s what unfolds, then we may be in for a good surprise this season. If we pull out all the stops, get creative with the play calling and don’t win by multiple TDs, then I’ll have a lot of questions to answer in next week’s Film Study.