Rams make Thanksgiving plans Colorado State coach Mike Bobo said the holiday is about family — the team is a family — so every player will have some place to go. He, and the rest of the coaching staff, will open up their houses to players and Colorado players are taking some of their out-of-state teammates homes. “A lot of the times kids over the years have tended to go with their teammates. They don’t want to see coach,” Bobo said. “I’m inviting anybody.” He won’t, he said, be throwing on an apron and helping to cook. Deonte Clyburn said he’s heading to Jordon Vaden’s house, while Nick Stevens will spend time with his legacy donors, and Colorado players have said their mom’s are preparing for busy days. The team will practice early that day, with a movie outing optional. Training room — Jasen Oden Jr. had one rush last week, sustaining a knee injury. Bobo said it wasn’t as serious as originally thought — it’s a sprain — but it adds to the ailments the senior already had (shoulder, hamstring). He will be questionable again this week. The secondary also took some hits against New Mexico, with safeties Trent Matthews and Kevin Pierre-Louis missing time in the game, as well as cornerback Preston Hodges. Bobo thinks the two safeties, who have been playing hurt most of the year, will be fine and ready, but he’d list Hodges as questionable at this time. Bowl plans — Bobo hasn’t spent any time guessing which game the Rams may play in, but he has told director of operations Tom Ehlers to devise a practice plan based on any and all dates in which the Rams might be playing. Bobo said itinerary need to be in place for the coaching staff to go recruiting, when and how players may travel to and from the bowl, depending on if the game is pre- or post-Christmas. Burning question — As Clyburn was finishing up his session with the press, the media asked if he had any questions for Stevens, who was sitting in the back enjoying a slice of pizza. “Why isn’t your hair blonde any more,” Clyburn said, noting that when they both came out on the same visit, Steven’s locks weren’t brown like they are now. Stevens said it grew out and he cut it off. “I thought it was a Cali thing,” Clyburn said

FORT COLLINS — Mike Bobo recognized it to be an issue because it couldn’t be avoided.

With Colorado State’s football team running new systems, there was no history for the players. There was no cache of background knowledge of what needs to be done against certain defensive fronts or even random offensive sets. If the Rams hadn’t seen it in practice, they hadn’t seen it at all.

It’s hard for teams to made adjustments that way, and the Rams were noticeably deficient in that regard early in the year. Now 11 games into the season, background knowledge has been acquired and it was something wide receivers coach Alvis Whitted wanted to acknowledge in a coach’s meeting Monday.

Head coach Mike Bobo called it a devotional period where he allows his staff to talk about whatever is on their mind, and that was Whitted’s topic.

“He talked about our team and what an old coach had said to him in the past was mid-stream adjustments; you have to make mid-stream adjustments,” Bobo said at his Monday press conference. “He talked about how our team is now getting comfortable doing that, being able to make the mid-stream adjustments within a game, offensively and defensively, where everybody is on the same page.”

The Rams have won three straight (now 6-5, 4-3 in the Mountain West) behind the three best rushing performances of the season, better balance on offense and committing just three turnovers in those games. Bobo said much of the success in the run game goes to what quarterback Nick Stevens is seeing at the line of scrimmage.

He’s more comfortable in the offense, but he’s also quicker to see what defenses are trying to take away.

“The reads on the run that we have to go through have kind of improved and made our offense more efficient and explosive late in the season, just because we’ve been in it and we know what adjustments to make that aren’t necessarily don’t go exactly by what you see on paper, how the defense should line up,” he said. “If they come out a little different than their supposed to, we know exactly how to counter that and what to do in those situations.”

Defensively, the Rams have played pretty solid in two of the past three games, the UNLV game being a bit of an oddity. A group that only had forced eight turnovers the first eight games has now collected seven in the past three.

Reading things better and getting more players to the ball has helped, but it’s not something that happens just during a game but in preparation during the week to anticipate what may be encountered.

“When you get back in the roll of things, everything just really flows into place,” linebacker Deonte Clyburn said. “With the confidence we’re playing with right now, I feel like when we get out there in practice, everything just really goes. There’s no really any breaks, there’s not really any mistakes, or any mental breakdowns. We’re just really honed in on what we need to do.”

That ability to recognize and adapt represents a major stride for the team, but it was going to take time. It required a memory bank of past experiences, ones the Rams now have moving forward, not only this season, but in ones to follow.

There were no guarantees it would happen, either. And like any coach, it’s not a skill that’s completely polished in Bobo’s estimation.

“I really feel like the improvement’s there,” he said. “I still think there’s a lot of improvement to continue to be made of understanding schemes, of how your base offense and defense works, but also understanding your opponent and how you’re going to attack that opponent.

“We’re getting there. Not near where I want us to be, but we’re getting better.”

Mike Brohard: 970-635-3633, mbrohard@reporter-herald.com and twitter.com/mbrohard