Colorado State fired defensive coordinator Tyson Summers amid Saturday's 56-26 loss to Oregon State, and head coach Jim Mora said so himself at the postgame podium. Read that word again. Amid. Not Sunday morning after the staff watched the coaches' copy, not Monday after a quiet conversation in an office with the door shut. During.
That timing is the whole story. Coordinator changes happen in October every year in this sport, and most of them follow the same script: a long flight home, a short night of sleep, a statement released around lunchtime with the word "direction" in it. This one skipped the script. When a head coach makes the move while the game clock is still running and then stands up and tells the room about it unprompted, he is telling you he had already seen enough and he wanted everyone, players included, to know the standard didn't move.
Fifty six points will do that. You can live with a shootout loss, you can live with a bad half, you can even live with a blown coverage that becomes a highlight. What a head coach cannot live with is the sense that the fix isn't coming, that the same thing is going wrong in the fourth quarter that went wrong in the first. Mora is a defensive coach by trade and by instinct. He knows what a defense looks like when it's out of answers, and he clearly decided he was watching one.
From the almanac: mora has stood on the other side of this. ucla let him go in november 2017, one day after the usc game. nobody in that profession needs the lesson explained twice.
What comes next is the part nobody enjoys. Somebody on that staff inherits the call sheet and the install on short notice, in the middle of a season, with a defense that just got torched on the road. Position coaches get asked to do two jobs. Players who recruited to a scheme get asked to trust a new voice in week whatever. Summers, for his part, is a coordinator with a long career behind him and the phone tends to ring again for coaches in that chair. It just rings on a different timeline than anyone wants.
The thing I'll be watching is simple: who is wearing the headset and calling it when Colorado State takes the field again, and whether that defense plays faster or plays scared. You can usually tell by the second series.