LAS VEGAS — Jay Norvell has been coaching way too long to change his philosophies now.

Both in college and in the NFL, he’s been in this profession for nearly 40 years. This upcoming season may be the most important of all.

Heading into year three at Colorado State, it’s essentially ‘put up or shut up’ time. After winning 30 games across his last four seasons at Nevada, the Rams did well to pluck Norvell from a Mountain West foe and bring him to Fort Collins.

Norvell was tasked to lead CSU back to a bowl game — something that hasn’t happened since 2017 and something he came really close to doing last season — and even though that required patience, 2024 will likely be the year everyone finds out if his way is one that can still be successful in this day and age in college football.

“I had to make a choice if I wanted to recruit high school kids and traditionally build the program the way we’ve always built it or if we wanted to go sign a bunch of transfer guys and guys that were unfamiliar with your culture and your program,” Norvell said Thursday at Mountain West media days. “I really believe the best way to go and the best players we could get is high school players. I know our coaching staff does a great job of evaluating and we have an exact plan of what we want at every position. To get the end result of the team that we want that looks like we want and plays like we want, you have to fill it with players that fit that profile.

“I just felt like it was more important to recruit high school players that had that profile and bite the bullet.”

Bite the bullet the Rams did in 2022 and 2023.

After a 3-9 campaign in Norvell’s first season, CSU went 5-7 last fall and had their hopes of reaching a bowl game dashed by a last-second field goal on the road at Hawaii in the final week of the season — their fourth game of the season that was decided by one play.

“We had to recruit so many players our first two years — 50 players in each class the first two years,” Norvell said. “A lot of those kids are young, they have to get in the weight room, they have to develop. We were like the young kid on the playground. Guys were pushing us around, we had to take some tough lessons and take our medicine. But, you know that? Our kids are grown up now and they’re not the same. Those hard lessons, sometimes those are the best motivators for you.”

At some point, for a program to take the next step, those close losses have to turn into close wins. There’s no better time than the present for Norvell’s Rams.

Although they lost the conference’s defensive player of the year in Mohamed Kamara, CSU returns talent all over the roster and was picked to finish fifth in the preseason Mountain West media poll.

Quarterback Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi and wide receiver Tory Horton are back, despite big programs that Norvell mentioned by name like Kansas State, Ole Miss and Texas A&M trying to tempt them into the transfer portal with promises of big money NIL deals.

On defense, defensive back Jack Howell and linebacker Chase Wilson are preseason All-Mountain West.

Most importantly, those 100 or so players the Rams have recruited the last few years have come a long way both mentally and physically.

“We’re building a competitive team and now, I’m so excited because experience is starting to pay off,” Norvell said. “We have experience and size and speed at almost every position. It’s just a different team.”

Norvell’s betting on his staff’s ability to find talent in high school and not transfer portal players who are former top recruits that flamed out at their first (or second) school.

“Sometimes you can fix a guy like that, sometimes you can’t,” Norvell said. ”A lot of the bigger schools are passing over high school talent. We want an NFL player and sometimes those guys are in high school and they haven’t developed yet but they have all the athletic skills and character skills we’re looking for. We would prefer to invest in that.”

Hmm, sounds like a pretty sharp contrast from that other team an hour southwest in Boulder — even if Deion Sanders was eager to point out this week the high percentage of high school players that suit up as freshman for Colorado.

“The biggest thing I really believe in our sports is (that) it’s still about continuity and experience,” Norvell said. “In our third year, we’ve really invested and tried to stay true to what we’re trying to do and build the program.”

The 2024 season may just reveal if Norvell’s way can still work… or if he’s a dinosaur watching a meteor hurl toward the Earth. No matter how it shakes out, he’s sticking to his guns.

“I’ve been coaching long enough to see different trends come and go,” Norvell said. “I just think there’s a lot of coaches doing ‘drive-by’ recruiting. They drive by and see a kid and if a lot of people are talking to him, they think he’s a good player. We just don’t do it that way. We know what we’re looking for. I was in the NFL for six years and working combines and being around the people that I was around a lot, I really learned a lot from Bill Polian and Al Davis, when he was alive.

“What we look for is very specific in players. We don’t care who’s recruiting ‘em, we don’t care how many stars they have, we don’t care how many offers they have and that’s really helped us over the years.”