Winning at Kent State is two holy rungs down from turning water into wine. If Deion Sanders was the splash, Sean Lewis was the coup.

And don’t be the schmuck on social media who tries to argue that because Lewis went 24-31 as the head coach of the Golden Flashes, his alleged departure from the CU Buffs is no big loss.

KSU averaged 2.8 wins in the five years before Lewis took over. They were 1-11 this past fall in the Flashes’ first season after he’d left. For all the grief CU gets as a “coaching graveyard,” Boulder’s Club Med compared to Kent. The man grew daisies in the desert. He made a shambling, zombified MAC program watchable.

He also made the Buffs fun as heck, if only for seven or eight weeks. Which is why Aztec fans are giving each other virtual high-fives after multiple outlets reported Tuesday that Big Sean is expected to replace Brady Hoke as San Diego State’s football coach.

Whether it’s Byron Leftwich, Hue Jackson or Hue knows, Lewis’  replacement at CU may well prove to be a step up — just so long as Coach Prime doesn’t hand the pencil over to Pat Shurmur full-time.

Yet none of them tick as many boxes as Big Sean did when he was rescued from northern Ohio this past December. As play-callers go, the Buffs had married up. The big guy with the bushy beard was as good a potential coach-in-waiting as the Buffs could’ve found in a pinch. If The Great Sanders Experiment ever went off the rails, Lewis was a logical, proven, potential successor. The steak to Coach Prime’s sizzle.

Well that steak is almost certainly gone now. And the Buffs smell a little burnt.

If Sanders gave CU an identity between the ESPN and FOX studio chairs, Lewis gave the Buffs one between the hashmarks.

#FolsomFast was #FlashFast first, a high-tempo, no-huddle scheme imported by Lewis that looked like the perfect marriage at 5,300 feet above sea level. Coach Prime’s speedy transfers blended with Lewis’ scheme and quarterback Shedeur Sanders’ arm laid the path, on paper, for exciting, Big-12 style shootouts. Over two months, it worked out that way in real life, too.

Before Coach Prime handed the keys to Shurmur, Lewis’ offense after eight games had ranked 32nd nationally in points per tilt (32.1) and 55th in average yardage (408.6).

Remember CU-TCU in Fort Worth? It looked like basketball on grass, as the late Joe Tiller liked to say, a wild, back-and-forth tug of war in which whomever had the ball last was going to win. Coach Prime had everybody convinced that as long as Shedeur was the one who got in the last word, that, like Brady, Manning or Montana, his word was gold.

The new-look Buffs became the cool hippie cousins of Mike Leach, drawing a line in the hot Texas sand for the rest of the world to see. Lewis helped birth a formula. A mantra. CU Football: The Fast And The Furious.

Then the wheels came off.

Sanders had been steaming after the ASU win, which devolved into a sloppy rock fight between two programs with first-year coaches. He was raging after the loss at UCLA, in which a feisty Bruins defense sacked his son seven times. Coach Prime put the call out for new linemen and left room under the bus to shove his offensive line coach, Bill O’Boyle, somewhere left of the rear axle. O’Boyle, of course, came to CU with Lewis from Kent.

Six days after that, word leaked that Shurmur would be calling plays at home vs. Oregon State, and sources told me the switcheroo was made right after UCLA — and that Lewis, like O’Boyle, had fallen out of favor with CU’s first family of football.

Shurmur, who’d been hired by Prime as an offensive analyst, shot past both Lewis and tight ends coach Tim Brewster and into the center ring of Deion Sanders’ Circle of Trust.

“First of all, this (switch) wasn’t easy because of the protections and all that stuff,” Sanders explained following a season-ending loss at Utah this past Saturday. “Pat and I communicate really well. Pat and Sean communicated really well. Pat and Shedeur communicate really well. So I think (Shurmur) did a great job. I really did.”

That said, the Buffs celebrated The Shurmur Era by scoring 19 points at home against Oregon State, most of them very late, and their fewest at Folsom Field all season.

In the four games in which Shurmur called plays, the Buffs averaged 20.3 points per tilt and lost all four. CU goes into Conference Championship Weekend ranked 61st out of 133 FBS squads in scoring (28.2 per game). The identity was gone.

Speaking of gone, CU’s top Class of ’24 QB recruit Danny O’Neil tipped Lewis’ hand when he reneged on his commitment this past weekend. With the first signing period looming in three weeks, the Buffs as of late Tuesday afternoon had reportedly locked down just nine commits, per the 247Sports.com database.

Now recruiting rankings can deceive in the transfer portal era — the Buffs cleaned up on the latter front last winter. And the portal, Sanders’ preferred place to shop, opens for business on Monday.

But those nine CU commits also constitute the second-smallest class — Houston, which recently fired coach Dana Holgorsen, listed just eight commits — in the reconfigured, 16-team Big 12.

Among the schools in the Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12, only the Cougars and Michigan State, which just hired away Jonathan Smith from Oregon State, had fewer commits than Coach Prime as of mid-day Tuesday.

“You know what we’ve got to do to get better,” Sanders said last week. “I don’t think we (were) the only team in the country who made a change (at coordinator), who changed some things around when they felt like they needed to.”

They weren’t. Only after Arkansas replaced its offensive coordinator following its first eight games, the Hogs’ scoring average actually went up (26.7 from 26.5) under the new guy. Indiana? Same story. (The Hoosiers managed 20.8 points per game in the five tilts before their OC swap; 23.1 in the seven after.)

Maybe Shedeur, once he’s healed, is so fly that Lil Wayne could call plays and make the CU offense hum. But on Tuesday night, a week away from the 1-year anniversary of Sanders’ hiring, you couldn’t shake this feeling that the Buffs had landed right back where they’d started.

And that the Aztecs just landed a coup.

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