In the present-day world of college football, every game is an audition. This applies to players, coaches, and teams.
If you do well, you improve your brand. Your stock rises, and for many, that might mean access to a bigger, more luxurious and more lucrative stage.
That was true before NIL and the transfer portal, when pro football, especially the NFL, was the Holy Grail, the pot at the end of the rainbow. But now you can move up on your way to that destination. Opportunity knocks sooner and more often, and upward mobility within the college football world takes on many different forms.
Decision-makers pay attention to every game, or at least have access to quickly learn what happened where, who did well and who didn’t. What used to be known as poaching is legal, in many cases necessary — players from teams, teams from conferences.
So, Saturday’s visit to Sam Houston was much more than a typical nonconference football game for the University of Hawaii.
It was the first chance for the Warriors to show that they might belong with Boise State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Colorado State on the path to a rebuilding Pac-12 since the news broke Wednesday that those four programs have been targeted to join Oregon State and Washington State.
You need at least eight football-playing schools to be an NCAA-sanctioned Division I, FBS conference.
That means — unless UNLV and Nevada or some other schools have deals we don’t know about — The Pac needs a couple more teams.
So, in that context, as well as others, UH football was an utter failure Saturday. The 31-13 loss to a team in just its second season in a conference at the same level as the Warriors provided nothing to strengthen the program’s marketing position.
It’s just one loss, and it’s nonconference. But it’s a very ugly one, and the timing is very bad.
I won’t spend a lot of time here dissecting exactly how the Warriors were dissected, but here are some of the key lowlights:
Hawaii self-destructed with 14 penalties for 122 yards. (And one of its key players was ejected for committing two personal fouls.)
The penalty stats would be good numbers for a running back, substituting carries for penalties. But at this point, that’s just dreaming for UH and its non-existent ground game.
As we’ve seen in the past, a scant running game isn’t necessarily a problem if you own the airways, but that’s not the case with Hawaii — partly because the receivers seem to drop as many passes as they catch.
This ties in with third-down efficiency, which was a deficiency for Hawaii once again: 2-of-14 is brutally bad. The defense was a little better, but not that great; the BearKats converted on third down seven of 15 times, and both times on fourth down.
When it reached the red zone, UH made just 13 of a possible 28 points (assuming one-point conversions, not two).
It got to the point where it was SHSU vs. SMDH.
The Warriors had their chances before the game got out of hand in the fourth quarter. But they rarely kept the momentum for more than a couple of plays at a time. With rare exceptions, whenever it looked like they got a fire going, they urinated on it.
Complementary football has become a trendy phrase in recent years. It means when the three parts of the team — offense, defense and kicking — build off of the success of the others. The Warriors had none of that Saturday; great opportunities provided by the other phases were frittered away.
Sure, give Sam Houston credit. It usually takes two to make a college football team look bad — like UCLA and Hawaii did to each other two weeks ago. By the way, any delusions about UH being Pac-worthy because it lost just 16-13 to the Bruins can be laughed off when Indiana welcomed UCLA to the Big Ten with a 42-10 spanking at the Rose Bowl on Saturday.
There are plenty of games left for UH to play this season, and hopefully, they’ll resemble something closer to good football.
But the Warriors did nothing Saturday to make a case for a bigger stage and a bigger part — especially since they helped their opponents take them apart.
