A bad defensive start and a worse third-quarter breakdown may not have sealed Hawaii football’s fate against New Mexico, but those mistakes were still more than the bowl-battling Rainbow Warriors could afford on Saturday night.
UH fared better against the Lobos’ hybrid triple-option scheme as the game went along but still fell 28-21, setting back its chances of a winning season (4-5 overall, 3-2 Mountain West) going into a challenge at San Diego State next weekend.
“It all comes down to us as a team, and as a unit,” said middle linebacker Jahlani Tavai, who led UH with 12 tackles. “If one person’s not doing their job, it’s crucial. Come San Diego, especially in San Diego, if one man is not playing their gap right, that guy will take it 90 yards if he has to.”
“That guy” refers to Donnel Pumphrey, the FBS season leader in rushing yards by a wide margin at nearly 1,500.
On Saturday, it was Tyrone Owens who took it up the middle and followed a blocker all the way into the end zone, 72 yards, for a 21-14 lead at the end of the third quarter. UH would tie it up at 21, but gave up the decisive touchdown on a fumble return.
UH held UNM to 237 rushing yards, 137.1 below the Lobos’ nation-leading average of 374.1.
That didn’t improve the mood of defensive coordinator Kevin Lempa afterward.
“We made some mistakes early, but the one we made a mistake on shouldn’t have went for a touchdown,” Lempa said. “It could be a 10- or 15-yard gain, but it shouldn’t be a 78-yard gain (actually 72). That’s the only thing I’m upset about, not the effort.”
The Rainbow Warriors came out a step slow in the intermittent pouring rain, while the Lobos (5-3, 3-1) looked unstoppable their first two drives, going 56 and 75 yards almost exclusively on the ground to jump out to a 14-0 lead.
The Lobos, who run an offense similar in some respects to that of Air Force, succeeded in disguising some of those early looks.
“We start bad. We’ve been doing this for like a few weeks, three out of four weeks,” Lempa lamented. “We start poorly. It’s like we’re not ready to go. I know last week (at AFA) we had to catch up to the speed. And it seems like the same thing happened here, but it happened for two series. They went up and down the field like Swiss cheese. And we gotta find a way to be ready to play the first play of the game.”
By halftime, UH stepped things up.
“(At first) we weren’t talking or communicating,” said Tavai, the reigning Mountain West Defensive Player of the Week. “That’s a big thing. But after those 14 points, that’s when everything changed. We started talking on the field, we made sure we wrapped up. And it just showed.”
“I thought defensively (UH) probably did the best job we’ve had done on us,” New Mexico coach Bob Davie said. “The multiplicity of what they did, they played about three or four different schemes where a lot of teams play us in one scheme. I thought they played extremely hard.”
