FORT COLLINS — The buck starts here. Alex Collins told me he knew of seven to 10 CSU football players approached by a Power 4 school this past spring, enticed by careless whispers and the usual blarney.
The Rams kept all but two.
“There are some kids that are trying to get through college and make every single dollar that they can,” Collins, the new general manager for the Rams’ football program, said Friday as we sat in his office at Canvas Stadium. “They’ll transfer seven times. They don’t care if it gets them more money.
“And there are some kids who felt uncomfortable getting paid. (They’ll say), ‘I’m not trying to get paid.’ I’ll (say), ‘I don’t care what you’re trying to do. If you’re a starter on this team, I’m not going to let you do that for nothing.’ And so it’s breaking those walls and barriers down. Hey, if you come up and tell me that a Power 4 school offered you money. I’m not going to take that in a bad light.”
Collins shrugged. He’s a sunny pragmatist from Wisconsin with two USC degrees. Friday marked the start of his first preseason camp in FoCo, having been hired from Ole Miss this past January to, as the official Rams website put it, oversee “the recruiting efforts and roster personnel for the CSU football program.”
So far, so good. As of Aug. 1, the Rams’ 2026 class was ranked fourth by the 247Sports composite among future Pac-12 members. It also checked in at No. 69 nationally. If that number holds through next winter, it’ll be the highest-ranked Rams haul since 2010 (68th).
According to the site, three-star safety Jermaine Santana-Diaz of Missouri City, Texas, and 3-star wideout Devin Hamilton of Hoschton, Ga., are the seventh- and ninth-best prep recruits, respectively, that CSU’s landed over the last 25 years.
“Alex is a really experienced guy. (When you) look at positions to bring in, you always look at where people are, where they’re coming from, and can they bring things that maybe we haven’t experienced,” coach Jay Norvell said. “So Alex is one of those guys — he was in the SEC for five years; he was at Ole Miss, he was at a very creative team recruiting and a very creative team (on) the NIL (front), so he saw a lot of different experiences.”
‘Never feel good about your room’
With Collins settling in, CSU’s put down the butter knife and nudged closer to the cutting edge. General managers are the new hot thing in college football, although the job description and responsibilities vary by school.
At Stanford, GM Andrew Luck sits above the coach on the program’s organizational chart, effectively serving as an assistant athletic director for Cardinal football. At CSU, Collins reports to Norvell as something more like an assistant coach in charge of contracts.
“So the way I kind of look at it is Coach (Norvell) didn’t want to deal with the money side of things; he didn’t want to get caught up in negotiations,” Collins explained. “I think in the grand scheme of things, it’s good to have someone that’s separate.”
His peers concur. Of the eight football programs that will comprise the Pac-12 in 2026, six already have general managers on their respective staffs. And the two that don’t, Oregon State and Utah State, list fairly close equivalencies among their support crew.
“The hard part (was) when I told our coaches this — I said, ‘Never feel good about your team, never feel good about your room.’ Because that’s how it used to be,” Collins explained.
“When CSU used to sign an NFL draft pick out of high school, you probably watched them the first day of fall camp and you went, ‘Dang, they’ve got this guy for three more years or four more years?’ (Now) you get on a player, (you) might have him for a year, might have him for two, might have him for three.”
Collins spent most of the last decade working for Lane Kiffin. Lordy, he’s seen some stuff. He also injected some Kiffinisms into the Rams’ collective recruiting ethos. The new GM asked each of the CSU assistants, for example, to cite the three most vital traits required for their position groups. Collins then reset his recruiting database accordingly to match their wants.
When it came to the transfer portal, Collins’ new litmus test for the Rams proved a monument to common sense. He’d ring up the position coach from a potential transfer’s old school and ask, simply, “Would you take him back?” If the answer’s “No,” you move on.
“Is there a shot every year that our top players are going to get skimmed? Sure,” Collins said. “And we’re trying to (adapt) a lot in how we do things, how we structure it, to lower that number and prevent it.
“I never want to lose a single player. Then it becomes, OK, if we’re constantly going to lose at the top, we’ve got to raise our bottom.”
‘Jay wants to finish his career here’
Since July 1, universities have been able to pay student-athletes via revenue sharing, thanks to the historic House vs. NCAA ruling. Collins has since served as one of CSU’s primary points of contact for Name/Image/Likeness (NIL) deals, player contract negotiations and financial packages.
“You’ve got high school kids on official visits, and that meeting between the dad, the kid, the agent, the GM, whoever’s in that room, is a 45-minute cuss-fest,” Collins said. “If you’re on your high school visit and you’re going, ‘If we don’t get $30,000 more, we’re not coming here,’ how does that set you up to be there for the next three or four years?
“That’s where I think, for us, you’ve got to have a little bit of a retention mindset first. Any in-state kid in my mind instantly goes up — you’re an hour from home here, you’re going to want to stay here.”
The Rams will never be college football’s Dodgers or Yankees. Yet Collins, Cheesehead to the last, keeps asking himself this question: Why can’t we be the Brewers?
“If you were Lane Kiffin at FAU, everyone probably could’ve seen — ‘OK, he ain’t trying to stay here,’” Collins said.
“Jay wants to finish his career here. He loves it here. He’s very happy here. So you can trust him, and therefore me, that you’re making long-term decisions about how you spend the money. We’re not trying to burn this down to go somewhere else.”
The Rams have offered 17 Colorado prep footballers in the Class of ’26. There are at least six more out for ’27. CSU hasn’t locked every gate. But at least the wolves are going to have to work for it.
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