It was Aug. 31, 2013, Matt Rhule’s first game as head coach at Temple, and all the Hail Mary’s in the world wouldn’t mean a hoot for the Owls against a Notre Dame team just 8 months removed the national championship game.

The Fighting Irish won 28-6, but for an Owls team that would win just 2 games that season, it wasn’t a terrible outcome.

Within a year, Rhule had Temple rolling, improving to 6-6 in Year 2 and 10-4 in Year 3, followed by another 10-win campaign in 2016, the Owls’ first set of back-to-back seasons with double-digit wins in program history.

That, of course, led to Rhule’s hiring by Baylor, which was coming off the Art Briles debacle. And Rhule’s Bears followed a similar plot to Rhule’s Temple ascension: Baylor went from 1-11 in 2017 to 7-6 a year later to 11-3 and a Sugar Bowl appearance in 2019.

From outhouse to penthouse in 3 years flat at 2 different schools.

A record in some haunts.

An eternity to Deion Sanders.

*****

Rhule, The Turnaround Artist, and his newest reclamation project — the once-proud Nebraska Cornhuskers — head to Boulder on Saturday morning for what has quickly become the hottest ticket in college football.

And it’s not because Coloradoans love the color red.

Coach Prime’s stunning Colorado debut last Saturday in Fort Worth has simply upended the college football universe. Colorado’s 45-42 win over a TCU team ranked No. 17 and coming off a national title-game run was the football equivalent to a meteorological event. It was consuming. It was polarizing. It was almost supernatural.

Tickets for the game are going for more than Alabama-Texas, with the college football world — hell, the sporting world at large — dying to see if the Buffaloes can move to 2-0, and then likely 3-0 with an ensuing Week 3 matchup against their hapless in-state rivals, the Colorado State Rams.

The Buffs are already up to No. 22 in the polls and rising sharply. A win over another national brand in Nebraska would only raise the hype level even louder. At this point, it’s deafening. How much louder can it get?

But, what, you expected Coach Prime to move … slowly?

This is Deion Sanders we’re talking about. Neon. Prime Time. The dude was the fastest man in cleats, the best cover cornerback of all time. Ran a 4.29 40-yard dash at the combine, unheard for 1989.

“I ran so fast, I felt like I was floating,” he told the NFL Network in 2017. “I felt like I was kinda coming off the ground.”

The idea that Prime would bide his time in Boulder is downright laughable.

He only knows one speed: Go.

And his Buffaloes went on Saturday. And how.

A year after a 1-11 season that was even worse than it sounds, Colorado’s offense on Saturday in Fort Worth operated at a pace more apt for the nearby Texas Motor Speedway. The Buffs’ defense chased down the ball carrier like he’d offended all their mamas at once.

It was blinding, just as Coach Prime wants.

All made possible because Prime hit the transfer portal like he did as a punt returner in his prime, finding the hole, darting clear through and into the warm arms of pure daylight.

*****

Unlike NFL head coaches, who most frequently operate under a general manager in charge of roster construction — something Rhule learned the hard way in his fruitless 3-year sojourn as the head coach of the Carolina Panthers — college football head coaches are not just in charge on Saturdays. They are their own general managers.

It’s a strange gig, really. They are producers, directors and casting directors, all rolled into one. Heck, if Prime was in prime playing shape, he might even want to run onto the field for a play or two.

He’ll have to settle for being in charge of the wildest, wackiest roster rebuild in college football history.

After all, Saturday’s matchup in Boulder isn’t so much a clash of coaches as it is a clash of architects.

You’ve got Coach Prime and his re-made Buffaloes, a complete teardown project if there ever was one. Put it this way: Prime didn’t take the job because he liked the house Karl Dorrell left standing.

Following a brilliant 2-year run at Jackson State, a historically black college in the historically black Southwestern Athletic Conference, Prime had a handful of schools kicking his tires. They’d seen the impact he’d made on the recruiting trail, where he’d reeled in his son, 4-star Class of 2021 quarterback Shedeur Sanders, and the Class of 2022’s No. 1 overall recruit, Travis Hunter, whose signing was arguably the biggest splash in recruiting history. They saw what he did for a Tigers program that had gone just 21-40 from 2014-20, going 27-6 with back-to-back SWAC titles.

He went with a once-mighty Colorado program that had become maybe the worst Power 5 program in the country, and we all know what happened next.

At his very first team meeting, Prime made it clear that many in the room would no longer be there come spring, and certainly not come fall.

In total, Colorado replaced nearly 90 roster spots with new faces, retaining fewer than 10 Buffaloes from last year’s roster. It was an overhaul the likes of which have never been seen before in the history of the game, only made possible by the new transfer rules that created a new market and by Colorado modifying its transfer requirements.

The result?

Shedeur Sanders, who followed his dad from Jackson State, threw for 510 yards and 4 touchdowns in the win over TCU, earning national quarterback of the week honors, joined on the podium by Hunter, who also arrived in Boulder via the Tigers. All Hunter did was play 144 snaps, catch 11 passes for 119 yards and intercept a pass on defense, the first player to have 100 yards receiving and a pick in more than 2 decades. That’s all.

The victory was, in a word, astounding.

But to Rhule, apparently not surprising.

“Coach Sanders is a football guy,” Rhule told reporters in his Monday press conference. “While you can watch all these peripheral things – like, you can see they show their practices, you can watch all the stuff on TV. At the end of the day, like, when has has he ever not been serious about football? He’s been a head coach now. He’s won at both places. So they’ve got elite players. Elite skill players and elite players up and down the front. Anytime you have a great quarterback, you’re going to have a chance to win. So I wasn’t surprised at all.”

*****

On the other side of the field Saturday, you’ll see a Nebraska team that is largely built from within.

If Colorado took it down to the studs — acquiring many more new studs in the process — Rhule is trying for more of a refurbishment in Lincoln.

The Cornhuskers added just a handful of impact transfers, including new starting quarterback Jeff Sims from Georgia Tech and former Arizona State offensive lineman Ben Scott, who started 28 games over three seasons for the Sun Devils.

Predictably, with primarily familiar faces from a 4-8 team that concluded the forgettable Scott Frost era, the Huskers lost to Minnesota, 13-10, on Thursday. Sims threw 3 picks in the heartbreaking loss.

That of course leaves Rhule in a familiar position: plotting, planning and promising brighter days ahead. The 2024 recruiting class is shaping up to be a good one for the Huskers as they try to rebuild their image.

“The rules are a little different now, but I respect anybody that’s just trying to figure out how to win,” Rhule said, according to the Associated Press’ Eric Olson. “There are different ways of doing it. However Coach Sanders is doing it, however (Wisconsin’s) Luke Fickell is doing it, however everybody is doing it, it’s not for me to say. For me, it’s, ‘Hey, this is how we’re doing it.’ And this recruiting class that we have right now is a really big one for us as we move forward.

“But, obviously, (the Buffs) are going to be a ranked team. So what they’re doing is working.”