The Steve Addazio Era in Fort Collins is over after just 16 football games.
CSU athletic director Joe Parker announced Thursday that the university has cut ties with its 62-year-old football coach after roughly two years on the job.
Addazio, who was let go after a 4-12 record with the Rams in one abbreviated season (1-3 in 2020) and one full campaign (3-9 in 2021), was slated to earn $1.6 million in 2022 as part of a five-year contract that ran through Dec. 31, 2024.
Addazio’s buyout dropped from $5 million to $3 million on Thursday, a factor that might’ve hastened the conclusion of one of the shortest — and strangest — tenures in CSU football history.
Parker announced that assistant coach Brian White will serve as Addazio’s replacement in an interim role in advance of the early National Signing Day period that begins Dec. 15. CSU said via its release that it will utilize “a national search firm,” but hasn’t specified a timetable as of yet.
Multiple sources told The Post that assistant football coaches were told to get off the road from recruiting and that a team player meeting was held at 11 a.m. to inform players of the news.
“I am grateful to Steve Addazio and his coaching staff for their steadfast commitment to our student-athletes, both athletically and academically, to developing men of high character, and reinvigorating our locker room with a culture of toughness and accountability,” Parker said via a university news release. “However, after a thorough review of where our program stands today and our outlook for the future, looking at the totality of factors, I felt this was a necessary step.
“Our expectation is to compete for conference championships and reach bowl eligibility each season. Our student-athletes deserve that, our fans deserve that, our community deserves that, and our University deserves that. We live in one of America’s best cities, serve a world-class university, and I am confident we will find a stalwart leader who can meet those expectations head on.”
Parker is scheduled to address media at 2 p.m. Thursday at Canvas Stadium.
At 16 games, Addazio’s stint as full-time Rams coach is the briefest since George Cassidy posted an 0-5 record in 1910 during Cassidy’s only season on the job.
The Rams finished the 2021 campaign on a six-game losing streak and to rapidly dwindling and discouraged crowds at Canvas Stadium, the 36,500-seat on-campus facility that opened in August 2017.
CSU’s season-ending, 52-10 home loss to Nevada on Nov. 27 was played before an announced crowd of 17,465, or just 47% of capacity. Over its last three home games, against Boise State, Air Force and the Wolf Pack, CSU averaged 22,745 paid customers, or 62% of capacity.
Many of those fans during the Nevada game had left by halftime, which the Rams entered trailing 31-0. Addazio wasn’t around for the second half, either. In what would be his final tilt as the Rams’ coach, the Connecticut native got ejected from the game with 4:41 left in the second quarter and his team down 28-0.
Addazio is believed to be the first football coach in modern CSU history to have ever been kicked out of a tilt, a fitting finale for a program figurehead who sometimes saved his most fiery rhetoric for postgame news conferences.
“Do I like where we are?” Addazio said after a 35-21 home loss to Air Force on Nov. 13. “I’d like to have more wins.
“But do I like where we are in terms of building this program? Hell, yeah. … We’re gonna build this thing one game at a time. One brick at a time.”
Now the university is asking Addazio to hit the bricks, closing the books on an epoch that felt star-crossed from the start.
A veteran of Urban Meyer’s coaching tree, the hiring of the Connecticut native as Mike Bobo’s successor in December 2019 was viewed with mild to complete surprise by pundits on both a local and national level.
Eyebrows were raised again when the 62-year-old Addazio, who was let go by Boston College after the 2019 season, admitted during his introductory news conference in FoCo that he’d never spent much time in the Front Range, let alone recruited here.
Addazio worked primarily as an offensive line coach at four FBS programs — Syracuse (1995-98) Notre Dame (1999-01), Indiana (2002-04) and Florida (2005-10) — and as an offensive coordinator with the Hoosiers (2004) and Gators (2009-10).
He coached with Meyer on Bob Davie’s Irish staff at the turn of the century and reunited with the current Jags coach when Meyer took the Florida job in December 2004.
Meyer, a CSU assistant from 1990-95, was brought on as a consultant by the university in its search to replace Bobo, although athletic director Joe Parker later downplayed Meyer’s influence in the hiring process.
As the impact to the coronavirus and the death of George Floyd shaped 2020, Addazio’s alleged response to both events drew criticism and ire from within the CSU athletic department.
Published reports featuring mostly anonymous sources from ESPN.com and the Fort Collins Coloradoan in late July and early August of that year cited potential violations of coronavirus protocol within the Rams football program, as well as presented allegations of abusive and racist behavior among current and former CSU football coaches.
McConnell hired the Kansas City law firm of Husch Blackwell to probe the athletic department in response. After roughly two months, the firm released a report that largely absolved Addazio of most of the accusations floated anonymously to media.
Husch Blackwell concluded, based on interviews with CSU students and staff, that issues with safety precautions regarding coronavirus were presumably because of inconsistencies and miscommunication. The firm found that racially insensitive language was more prevalent under Bobo and former Bobo assistants who are no longer with the department than during Addazio’s regime. The investigation cost the university $107,397.50.
Coronavirus cancellations and a Utah State player boycott limited Addazio’s debut season to just four games in 2020, with the only victory coming against rival Wyoming on Nov. 5 at Canvas Stadium.
Addazio posted a 1-2 record in trophy-game tussles with the Cowboys and Air Force, while COVID-19 forced the cancellation of the 2020 Rocky Mountain Showdown with CU in Fort Collins.
The Rams job was Addazio’s third as an FBS head coach and his first outside the east coast. Addazio posted a 44-44 record in seven seasons at Boston College (2013-19) and was 13-11 over two years at Temple (2011-12).
This is a developing story.
