FORT COLLINS — It’s the last game of the college football weekend and it means everything to the team in green and gold.

It might seem like an innocuous game between teams with nine combined wins that will kickoff at 11 p.m. on the East Coast. There won’t likely be many people that tune in live, but Colorado State at Hawaii couldn’t be much bigger.

It’s quite simple for the Rams: win and they go to their first bowl game in six years. Lose, and they don’t.

“We’re trying to teach our players to win,” CSU coach Jay Norvell said. “We get a chance to do that this week and show improvement. If we win, we get a chance to do it again. I really don’t care when, where, how, it just matters that we get an opportunity to play and improve as a team.”

For Norvell, just playing an important game during Thanksgiving week is a start for his program. Norvell is a regular when it comes to making bowl games during his coaching career, and he came to Fort Collins to make December football a regularity for Ram fans.

To do so, he knows his team has to go make the long trip to Honolulu and win a game that has plenty of challenges built in already aside from the pressure of bowl eligibility.

In the most Colorado analogy possible, Norvell likened it to a trapper who emerges from the mountains with a bunch of pelts on his horse.

“It shows that he’s accomplished something,” Norvell said. “I think that helps a player’s confidence when you play in a big game like this or you play in a bowl game. You just have that in your history and it’s part of the confidence you move forward with. We want that. We want the banners to be hanging around in this stadium and in our facility.”

Against a Rainbow Warriors team that has won three of its four games at home this season and boasts a dangerous offense, it’s going to take a complete effort.

It’s a coaching staff that CSU is very familiar with as Hawaii coach Timmy Chang coached under Norvell at Nevada for five years and was actually set to be on the Rams staff last year before getting the job at his alma mater.

“I’m really proud of Tim and what he’s done there,” Norvell said. “He’s really working and developing the players there. That’s really the quality of a good coach. I know Timmy has those leadership skills and I also know how important it is for them to finish strong. They want to win this game badly to show improvement in their program and we want the same thing.”

With school not in session this week, the Rams were able to adjust their practice schedule and arrive on the island on Thanksgiving to best get acclimated to the three hour time difference.

It’s a unique challenge that some of the CSU players have done before, but some, like freshman quarterback Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi, have yet to.

“Every week it’s a new experience with Brayden,” Norvell said.

The Rams are going to need their best from their young quarterback, who’s lacked consistency in recent weeks, but who also Norvell said played much better than he originally thought last week against Nevada.

“He threw some really amazing balls in that game, made some big plays, had another big one that should’ve been caught,” Norvell said. “Even though he probably could’ve probably completed a couple more intermediate passes, I thought the plays that he made in the game were critical for us (in) winning that game.”

There’s no room for excuses this week. CSU knows it is on the cusp of becoming a contender in the Mountain West and winning games like this to earn a few extra weeks of practice and bowl game is what’s required to be just that.

“We’ve fallen short in some big games this year and we want an opportunity for more,” Norvell said. “This is just another step in us establishing ourselves as a winning program.”

King’s prediction

Colorado State 28, Hawaii 27

The Rams have had a tendency of making things harder than they should be this season and the regular season finale should be no different. Jay Norvell’s team will fall behind early but will do enough to hang around until freshman QB Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi leads a game-winning touchdown drive in the final minutes that ends with a go-ahead extra point by 31-year-old kicker Jordan Noyes.