Jim Mora Jr. has been a very frustrated man in his first season at Colorado State. And after his team was absolutely shellacked by Washington State on Saturday night, he said that he didn’t think people at Colorado State know how to win.
Washington State beat Colorado State 73-7 as the Cougars ran for nine touchdowns. Washington State rushed 58 times for 535 yards; that’s over nine yards a carry. QB Owen Eshelman threw for a TD himself and was 13-of-14 passing for 135 yards. He barely averaged more yards per pass than the team did per rush.
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The loss dropped Colorado State to 3-7 overall as the Rams have lost seven of their past eight games. Mora, who was hired from UConn at the end of the 2025 season, ended his postgame news conference saying that he thought his team would keep fighting over the last two games of the season. And then had this to say:
“Hopefully we can get a couple of wins, so they can learn how to win — what it takes to win,” Mora said. “You know? I think that’s a real problem here. And it has been for many, many years. These are people here that don’t know how to win. The place I’d came from, they’d won 16 national championships in basketball so the whole school knew how to win. We gotta teach people around here how to win.”
Colorado State, which went 2-10 a season ago after firing Jay Norvell seven games into the season, won eight games in 2024. Before that, the Rams had six straight losing seasons but won 10 games as recently as 2014.
UConn, meanwhile, has been proof that success in men’s and women’s basketball doesn’t guarantee anything in football. While Mora led the program to back-to-back nine-win seasons in 2024 and 2025, UConn had 12 straight losing seasons before then. And over the 2018, 2019 and 2021 seasons — UConn didn’t play football in 2020 — the Huskies were a combined 4-32 ahead of Mora’s hire.
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From this vantage point, the easiest way for Colorado State to start winning would be to start giving up fewer points. Yes, that sounds incredibly basic, but the Rams defensive statistics are absolutely preposterous this season.
Colorado State is giving up nearly 48 points per game and has allowed 137 points over its last two losses. The Rams are dead last among 138 FBS teams in scoring defense. Southern Miss is 137th with 36.5 points per game allowed. The Golden Eagles are closer to SMU, the team 79th in scoring defense, than they are to Colorado State one spot behind them.
The Rams’ defense has also gotten worse after Mora’s viral midgame confrontation with former defensive coordinator Tyson Summers.
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Summers, the team’s interim coach at the end of 2025, left the sideline in the middle of Oregon State’s 56-26 win over the Rams on Oct. 3. After the game, Mora said that Summers was no longer with the program.
Since Summers’ firing, Colorado State has allowed at least 64 points three times.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
