In his postgame summation at West Point on Saturday, University of Hawaii football coach Nick Rolovich gave the expected plaudits to special teams play, some defensive stops, etc.

Then, he thanked the… equipment folks and travel staff?

It was a reminder that when you are the Rainbow Warriors, football’s most widely traveled team — college or pro — there is more to the aerial game than passing the ball and more to the ground game than handing it off.

There is also the matter of transporting a team and all its gear, from jocks to socks, from point “A” to point “B” and back again which, in the ’Bows’ case, can be the other side of a very wide country.

With the Army game and this Saturday’s homecoming with Duquesne, UH begins to settle in on what is to become a familiar pattern for the next two months: road game, home game, road game, home game …

Not until the Nov. 3 game with Utah State and Nov. 17 contest with Nevada-Las Vegas, sandwiched between the season’s only open date, will the ’Bows have — for them — the luxury of two consecutive games without jumping on an airplane.

Nobody does that to the mileage extent of UH. Consider that four games — two of them road appearances — into the 2018 schedule the ’Bows have already traveled 16,690 miles, which is more than 21 of the 32 NFL teams will do all season.

By the time they return from the regular-season finale, the Nov. 24 game at San Diego State, the Rainbow Warriors will have traveled more than 38,000 miles. That’s more than anybody in the NFL and more than the Panthers, Falcons, Bengals and Jets combined will travel this season.

What the Rainbow Warriors do is crazy on several levels — financial, physical and academic. But because of geographic location, it is part of the tradeoff if you are going to play a major college football schedule.

As Naval Academy athletic director Chet Gladchuk put it before the Midshipmen made their trip to Aloha Stadium, “I don’t know how (UH) does it every year.”

The Navy, which unlike UH, almost exclusively travels by charter, made a rare commercial flight for the game here due to the $350,000 financial guarantee when the game was originally contracted in 2011 and subsequently pushed back to suit Navy’s conference scheduling needs.

Rice coach Mike Blomgren, who had coached in California, said, “I know the trip to Hawaii is five hours from the (West) coast, so coming from Rice (in Houston) is a haul. But we can’t say too much about it when you folks do it all the time.”

But Blomgren did get his administration to secure an open date on the schedule after the Owls’ appearance at Aloha Stadium.

For the Rainbow Warriors this week, the positioning of a Football Championship Subdivision team, in this case the Dukes, on the schedule immediately after a 9,962-mile round trip jaunt to the East Coast to play the U.S. Military Academy is hardly happenstance.

Since UH plays 13 games in 14 weeks, there is only one open date to go around. So, athletic director David Matlin and associate AD Carl Clapp, who oversees scheduling, attempted to build in some cushion by designating this week for an FCS opponent. FCS members have fewer scholarship players, fewer coaches, smaller budgets and, theoretically, at least, fewer chances of giving UH a hard time.

When you travel the miles UH does, you do what you can to try to soften some of the landings.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.