FORT COLLINS — You can sell the opener. You can sell getting CU at your pad to open the fight card. You can sell a chance to milk Buffs fans the way the Buffs turned Nebraska’s Sea of Red into Christmas in Cancun.

You can sell Warren Jackson’s NFL frame and NFL game, if they’re still in the zip code. You can sell Dante Wright’s wheels and Trey McBride’s bullish romps up the boundary.

How do you sell 4-8?

How do you sell Mike Bobo now?

“That’s a tough one, I’ve got to be honest with you,” Joel Klatt, the Fox Sports college football analyst, CU alum and former Pomona standout, told The Denver Post.

“I think that change for change’s sake is never good, in any walk of life. Whether it’s an individual or a corporation or a group or a program, nobody should change just for change’s sake.

“I think that you need a vision. I think you need a point and a purpose to it. And I think that even CSU should look at the way (CU athletic director) Rick George did it last year, and that was to fix very specific elements of the program. Namely, toughness, the ability to be physical. And he’s gone out and achieved that.

“So purposeful change is much better than change for change’s sake.”

OK, so pick a lane, Joe Parker.

A vision. A point. A purpose.

Who are you?

What are you?

A superstructure without a soul?

Or paying customers?

Say you want to throw out the generational snowstorm and the 12,324 who allegedly turned up for Friday’s season-ending loss to No. 20 Boise State, that we should chuck the Rams’ smallest home crowd in seven years away as some frosty aberration. Groovy.

The other five home games at Canvas Stadium this season drew an average of 25,540 fans in a stadium that seats 36,500 patrons — 69.9 percent of capacity. In 2017, during the inaugural season of the facility, the Rams drew an average of 32,062 fans, or 87.8 percent.

So over roughly 24 months, you’ve dropped by almost 7,000 bodies per game and by nearly 20 percentage points overall.

How do you sell 4-8?

How do you sell Mike Bobo now?

“As I told the (team) in (the locker room), despite the noise outside, we are really close to being really, really good,” Bobo said after the Rams ended the season with three straight defeats, two of them in rivalry games.

“But it’s a bottom-line business. I know that. I think we all know that. And we didn’t get it done this year.”

Bobo insists, with a straight face, that they’re close. He might well be right. Blowout losses to CU, Arkansas and Air Force featured flashes of hope and deceptive score-lines, skirmishes that only got out of hand late.

But by the same token, the idea that the Rams can play with anyone only underlines how much of those fine margins might have flipped the other way with better situational play. Better play-calling.

Better, you know, coaching.

CSU wound up 15 points away from 6-6, although those 15 points were over two contests. After huffing, puffing and failing to blow Jaylon Henderson’s house down, the Rams dropped to 4-7 since the start of the 2017 in games decided by eight or fewer.

The Broncos, the division’s gold standard, are 9-4.

If you’re still trying to figure out what they have that you don’t, start there.

“I think it’s an identity that we’re kind of growing into, that we’re trying to get to,” Rams fullback Adam Prntice said. “I wouldn’t say that we’re completely there, but that’s the end goal.”

It’s not the building. It’s the people, same as it ever was. And this thing, no matter how much you spin, isn’t going to sell itself.