It was a high school basketball referee a year ago who initially got the ear of the Colorado State football staff and mentioned the name Trae Moxley.

Or something like that.

Moxley, a senior tight end from Roaring Fork, signed with the Rams on Wednesday. He isn't sure if the story's true. He just knows that the CSU staff called his high school football coach out of the blue one day last spring and asked for a highlight tape. His coach, Tory Jensen, quickly put one together and posted it to YouTube. In short order, CSU offered the 6-foot-5, 270-pound Moxley a scholarship, and jokingly asked him to remove the tape from YouTube, just so that no one else would recruit him.

"He jumps off the film," Jensen said. "I mean, I've looked at a lot of film of a lot of kids ... and he's a different kid on film than what you see around here. He's a kid that can dominate a game. He changed everything. He was able to — on both sides of the ball — just take over a football game."

Moxley is something of a small-school wonder, a prime example of CSU coach Jim McElwain's pledge to recruit Colorado's nooks and crannies. Roaring Fork, a Class 1A school, went 2-7 last season, but Moxley had close to 700 receiving yards.

Moxley has a competitive fire in him, Jensen said, that needed some cooling in practice.

"It's tough because, in a small-school environment, we don't have a lot of kids that can go work him in practice to give him the best looks all the time," Jensen said. "It's hard to control him. He gets fired up, and all of a sudden he's working on a kid, and you're like, 'Whoa, whoa, slow down, Trae. You're going to scare this kid away from ever playing football.'

"I wouldn't say he's confused by it, but he's just like, 'C'mon, I've got to be able to do that,' " Jensen said. "I'm like, 'I get it, but you're going have to wait 'til Friday and take it out on some other poor kid. Leave ours healthy, please.' "

Moxley is also a standout basketball player and plays baseball. He had NCAA Division II offers to continue playing basketball in college, but Division I was always the goal. As Moxley started to decide which sport to play at the next level, he realized that there aren't many 6-5 post players roaming around major-college basketball.

"In basketball, I would be more of a shooting guard, I suppose, rather than a post, which I am now," Moxley said. "So it would be a really hard transition to have to become a shooter and be able to dribble the ball really well."

Moxley committed to CSU's football team last May, shortly after he got the scholarship offer.

"I thought I'd have to do a lot more extensive stuff — like go down there to camps, showcase my abilities, I guess," Moxley said. "More than them just looking at my highlight film and saying, 'We'd like to offer you a scholarship.' "

Moxley is a likely redshirt candidate for the Rams as he makes the adjustment physically to Division I football. College-type workouts, though, are the norm for him. The senior worked with a personal trainer for the past 2½ years to, as he put it, "try to get me to be a little less clumsy."

In that time, Moxley has lowered his 40 time from 5.0 seconds to 4.85 and gone from not being able to dunk a basketball to slamming it with ease.

"The biggest part about it," Moxley said, "was just getting into the weight room and getting a lot more muscle so I could carry my big frame."

Ryan Casey: 303-954-1983, or