BOULDER — As I toured what will be the University of Colorado football team’s new headquarters, with its state-of-the-art locker room and touch-screen televisions and underwater treadmills, it made me wonder: How did CU ever get recruits before all this?

The Buffs haven’t had a facility overhaul since 1991, which was, of course, the year after they won the national championship.

Now in 2015, they’re not just keeping up with the Joneses — they’re keeping up with the Jetsons.

Along with an indoor practice facility, the mother ship called the Champions Center cost them $156 million — and looks like it’s from a new millennium. Well, will look. It’s a work-in-progress now, just like the football program it will house.

“Everything in this building will be complete by the first of August,” said athletic director Rick George, who took me and a photographer on a private tour. “We have a lot of work to do, as you can see.

“We’re really proud of it — it’s going to be transformational for us. … I think people will look at it and see that we’re investing in our program. Football is important to us. And from a recruiting standpoint, in this day and age, they like to have new things — and it’s going to be as good as any one in the country.”

Is it? Really?

“Oh, yeah,” George said. “It’s going to be spectacular.”

College football is a fascinating dichotomy. Smart men devote years to developing plays, growing as coaches while going gray. But whether these men will succeed or not often comes down to the mind-set of some cocky kid who just got his driver’s license.

Yes, the more you do with less can accelerate a budding program — and for many recent years at CU, we’ve seen less with less. But as an old coach once told me, the five most important things in college football are: “Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting, recruiting and scheduling.”

And CU’s new palace should wow any recruit who takes a gamble on visiting Boulder.

As we toured, there was a cacophony of banging and clanging, buzzing of saws and beeping of trucks backing up. They’re working shifts during the day and into the night. The adjacent indoor practice facility, 110,000 square feet, “is the only self-sustaining indoor practice facility in the country — it has a solar-paneled rooftop,” explained Emily Canova, the assistant AD for special projects. “So it’s something we’re super proud of.”

As for the Champions Center, one of my initial thoughts was: It’s way bigger from the inside than it looks on the outside. It’s vast, man. Nestled next to the old Dal Ward Athletic Center, this structure is 227,000 square feet, with six floors of awesome.

The cathedral-like locker room will be cathartic. It’s part VIP lounge and part museum, with a ring room and an NFL room, honoring the pro Buffs. There are 121 lockers in this expansive room, and George said coach Mike MacIntyre desired a design that allowed him to see every locker when speaking.

“And there will be a Buffalo (light) that shines down,” George said.

During a previous tour at the home of the Pac-12’s Joneses — Oregon — CU administrators were wowed by the long, indoor recovery pools. So, they built some recovery pools.

“Back in the day, you’d sit in the tub after practice,” George said. “When the players come in after practice, they’ll walk through this in their shorts — 38 to 42 degrees — and it’s to help their legs recover, so as they walk through, they’ll finish in the wet area. This will all be glassed in. And there will be TVs and different things. And we’ll have three hydrotherapy pools in this area and an underwater treadmill in two of them.”

The four floors above include a high-performance sports center, rooms for spin classes, innovative weight training for the teams, fancy offices for bosses and a recruiting lounge with window views that look like a postcard.

Personally, I was sold when we got to the sixth and top floor. Similar to the Coors Field rooftop, the Champions Center roof overlooks Folsom Field and the Flatirons. A select number of fans can buy an additional ticket to party up there during a game. There will be fire pits — and maybe even Fireball whiskey.

It’ll be Christmas in August for MacIntyre when they open up this place.

The new structure will be new-fangled, and recruits like shiny new things. But just because you have a home like a Jones, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll sign a Cardale Jones.

Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or twitter.com/hochman