The question has evolved during the past few months, this question about the three major college football programs in Colorado.

In December, it was, "What happened?"

These days, it's "What happens now?"

To remind fans practicing the art of selective amnesia, last season was the state's autumn of collective collegiate gridiron discontent.

After spending much of the past couple of decades posturing for conference championships and playing in bowl games, the football programs at Colorado, Colorado State and the Air Force Academy crashed with a collective, painful whimper.

CU, trying to rebuild from an unseemly recruiting scandal that sullied the school's reputation and turned heads nationally, finished 2-10 in the debut season under Dan Hawkins, charged with the task of digging out of it all.

CSU, no longer getting the game-pivoting athletes of past seasons, finished 4-8, the worst record in coach Sonny Lubick's mostly excellent 15-year tenure in Fort Collins. The Rams unceremoniously dropped their last seven games.

Air Force was just as bad, equaling CSU's inglorious 4-8 record while hastening the retirement of its living legend of a coach, Fisher DeBerry.

It was the first season all three finished with losing records since way back in 1981. And in seven years during that span, all three earned the privilege of competing in postseason bowl games.

So, 2006 was quite the comedown.

But how did Colorado suddenly become college football's version of Siberia? And what are the principals planning to do about it?

Question 1 has been posed, pondered and postulated through a long, soul-searching offseason. So let's move on to Question 2.

Fresh face in Falconland

Troy Calhoun, eminently classy and steady as it goes, isn't about to rip on the man who made Air Force football matter again. He played for Fisher DeBerry, learned from the man, built his reputation as a fine young football mind with DeBerry's considerable guidance.

So it's a delicate situation for Calhoun. When the first-year coach is asked how the Falcons fell to mediocrity during the past few years, he is diplomatic yet firm in his convictions.

"One of the things that I saw watching film (of last season's team) is the players didn't seem as strong and energetic in the last few games," said Calhoun, 40, who played for DeBerry as a backup quarterback in the late 1980s and most recently served as an offensive assistant with the NFL Houston Texans.

"That's something that has to change. We need to be a team that gets stronger, literally, as the season goes on. We have to be a more powerful team and a more skilled team, and I think the residuals of that will show themselves as the season goes on."

Calhoun takes over a program DeBerry built into a consistent winner, and while the end of DeBerry's tenure wasn't a happy time, at least Calhoun knows it can be done at Air Force. He knows because DeBerry, in his remarkable 23-year run, took the Falcons to 12 bowl games.

Calhoun radiates the same kind of verve and enthusiasm as the man he replaces.

"The thing that fires you up most about working at the academy is the quality of the young men you get to work with," he said. "They're bright, they're unselfish and they're winners. You try to build on what you have and what you do well, and what we have with these cadets are complete people.

"They're the kind of people who like to be challenged. We're not going to be a team that walks on eggshells. We're going to play like our hair's on fire."

It could take a while. Air Force is being picked near the bottom of the nine-team Mountain West Conference by all the prognosticators. Calhoun, for a year or so, will have a honeymoon period. But he knows that won't last.

So does Hawkins at CU.

Rebuilding from infamy

When the booze-and-sex recruiting scandal rocked CU's Boulder campus a few years back, fans wondered what the upshot would be. It didn't take long to find out.

Coach Gary Barnett eventually was shown the door and Hawkins was imported from Boise State to vacuum the sludge. What CU fans conveniently forgot was the reins handed to Hawkins were impossibly frayed and tangled.

Barnett and his staff couldn't recruit effectively with all the negative vibes surrounding the bad- news Buffaloes, and the result was a 2006 team bereft of the kind of talent necessary to compete in the rugged Big 12 Conference.

Last season's Buffaloes will be best remembered for posting one of their 10 losses against Montana State. At home, no less. The Buffaloes also were beaten by CSU, which went on to beat only one of its eight opponents in the Mountain West.

This was a CU football program that only a year before was celebrating its second consecutive Big 12 North title. So the sound of the Buffs' crash landing was loud enough to be heard across the college-football-watching nation.

"I've said this many times: You don't want to be close to having a good marriage, you don't want to be close to getting a raise, you don't want to be close to graduating," said Hawkins, a likable man who knows the patience of bummed Buffs fans can't last forever.

"But we were close (last season). We just couldn't quite finish in a few games. But we're a lot stronger, a lot more fortified (this season)."

Hawkins has been around long enough to know it all comes down to recruiting, and he and his staff, at least on paper, signed a reasonably strong recruiting class in the aftermath of the program's worst record in 24 years.

And included in Hawkins' first recruiting class in 2006 was the quarterback of the present and future, a dynamic talent who happens to be Hawkins' son. Cody Hawkins hopes to be part of a CU football renaissance.

How quickly can that happen? The elder Hawkins is optimistic. He already is seeing changes in his players' mind-set. He wants them to be aggressive, fearless. He wants them to make things happen.

"If it's fourth and less than 3 and we're down here (in opponents' territory) and we even think about kicking a field goal, they should call me out in public," he said. "We've got to be able to develop that sort of feeling amongst us — and I think we're starting to get that way."

CSU was that way in Lubick's nice years. But that has been a while.

Ram-tough? Not lately

If he has heard it once, he has heard it a thousand times: Sonny Lubick, 70, has lost his touch.

His teams no longer make the crucial winning plays down the stretch. The Rams are on the decline, and only when he retires can they regain their place as an annual Mountain West contender.

Lubick, whose name is on CSU's football stadium, bristles at the talk.

"People see that our program has slid, but all it takes is a few wins to turn things around," he said as he prepared the Rams for Saturday's opener against CU at Invesco Field at Mile High. "We were about three or four plays from having a winning season last year."

But those plays didn't happen, and CSU is 21-29 in the past 50 games. This isn't a one-year blip; this qualifies as a trend. But Lubick is undaunted.

"I think I'm a better coach than I was five years ago, but naturally, people are going to say things about you when it's up here (raising his hand above his head) and then for a couple years it's down here (holding his hand a foot off the floor)," he said.

"You think about that, but you know deep down in your heart you still have it. We've made some mistakes, but as far as the game passing me by, it's natural for people to think that, but I don't think that way at all."

Lubick and his retooled staff have plenty of reasons for optimism this season.

The majority of the starters return, and premier runner Kyle Bell is expected to lead a rushing rebirth after missing last season with a right knee injury.

"I like this team, like the way the players worked in the offseason," Lubick said. "They want to put last year in the past, and they've been working hard to do that. I think we've done a lot of great things at CSU, and I'd like to see more.

"I feel good physically, and I feel strongly that we can win a few more games and get back to a bowl. That's our goal."

Can it happen? Lubick thinks it can, and Lubick has done remarkable things at CSU before.

Like Calhoun and Hawkins, he knows there's nowhere to go but up.

holtzr@RockyMountainNews.com. Staff writer B.G. Brooks contributed to this report.

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