The ones with staying power, those long time, successful college football coaches who find ways to build creativity and growth in their modest programs, are always the ones with an extra awareness of the world around them.
These coaches with jobs in places that often lack national championship pedigrees, that don’t have the drawing power of an Alabama, Ohio State or USC, those coaches seem to have a sixth sense for noticing and incorporating the right building blocks at just the right time.
It might seem a bit premature, but the hunch here is that Nick Rolovich, closing in on the start of his second year at the University of Hawaii, is one of those coaches.
He is incorporating the past, borrowing from here and there, and injecting his own personal understanding of this special place we live to bring the football program back to life, Hawaii style.
It can happen with the right guy.
For years, Frank Beamer was one of those guys at Virginia Tech, where he used a superior understanding of the kicking game and a lunch bucket imagery as the core of a team effort to build a combative team that grew into one of the programs you really didn’t want to play to play down South.
In the Mountain West Conference, Rocky Long built a substantive team over time that seems to get stronger every year, with a 54-26 record in the conference since 2011. Gary Patterson started at TCU in 2000 and has built that group into a Top 10 team in 10 of his 16 years at the school.
Beamer built around a special teams insight, Long and Patterson leaned on defense. Others have done it with offense, the spread in many cases, has lifted dozens of programs to a higher level. It isn’t about what you do, it’s how you do it.
Rolovich might be ready to join that group of overachieving coaches who understand how to build and what tools to use in the process. He’s using, among other things, an object lesson formed by two high achievers who never played for the Rainbows.
We chatted again last week when Rolovich was in Hilo for a fund-raiser and a chance to talk story about the 7-7 season that ended with something better than any player on the roster had ever known at the end of a season — they won a bowl game with a 52-35 victory over Middle Tennessee State in Honolulu.
Winners. A bowl championship.
Rolovich talked about what that meant to the 110 or so players involved in the program last year and while you might think a break-even record is nothing to pat yourself on the back about, that overlooks what it meant to those players and how it figures into the future.
“Our seniors, from the public perception, were losers, that’s how people thought of them,” Rolovich said. “They walked around campus and didn’t look people in the eye, they were stigmatized in a way.”
Before the first play of the first game, Rolovich was aware that his players needed to feel success in some way or another. In the offseason, small wins were rewarded in a variety of ways. In the weight room, as one example, brand new socks were awarded for top marks, little things that brought a smile and a tiny sense of accomplishment.
But Rolovich isn’t just some feel good Candyman, handing out goodies and patting players on the head when they did something right. He wanted them to embrace who they were and where they were. His plan to get the Rainbow Warriors back in contention for a conference championship and invitations to big bowls has a lot to do with two players who had great college careers elsewhere.
“I think of it as the M&M effect,” he said, referring to two Hawaii raised players, Manti Te’o and Marcus Mariotta. “Those two guys are from (Oahu), they are influenced by the same conditions that influence our players, and they showed the aloha values put into practice.
“Marcus and Manti represent the best of what we can be here,” Rolovich said. “They have that ohana, that family humility and respect that we all know here and they have that ferocious athlete inside. Our kids know about that, they have an awareness and we need to build it up.”
One went to Notre Dame, one went to Oregon, but the lasting point is that they were both drafted into the NFL because of what they had inside that got the attention of those two schools.
“I like that character matters,” Rolovich said, “and we had a bunch of leadership on our team last year. Those guys got it.”
They got it because of a coach who knew what they needed, what they lacked, and also knew how to guide them from week-to-week in a brutal schedule that started in Australia against Cal and went to Michigan the next week. They lost to Cal and by the time they got to Ann Arbor, Rolovich said he had players who couldn’t stay awake from all the travel.
“(The Michigan game) was the worst loss (63-3), I think I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. “But we played and we didn’t quit. I didn’t have one guy who quit out there. We used it to build on.”
They found a way to win a 14-13 game at Fresno State, they won a shootout against Massachusetts, 46-40 and they got the invitation to the bowl game and found themselves down 14-0 when barely five minutes had been played.
They won going away and if you couldn’t tell there was something special about that group, it might be because you aren’t a football coach.
Tony Franklin is the offensive coordinator at Middle Tennessee after few years at Cal. Franklin was an early exponent of the spread offense, he has written books on it, he conducts seminars all over the country and he was suitably impressed by what he saw from UH.
In a social media message between us last week, Franklin said, “They believe in their head coach and what he’s teaching. Kids played hard and overcame adversity.
“I believe (Rolovich) was a great hire and has the ability to be a star in the profession,” Franklin said.
That’s not a reporter telling you the local coach is good, it comes from someone Rolovich didn’t know at all, who got to watch some tape and then had the opportunity to see the Rainbow Warriors up close.
If Rolovich is right, if tapping into that Hawaii ohana and building a competitive fire wrapped in humility catches on, this is going to be a team headed upward again.
Saw a futures betting line in Las Vegas last week that UH pegged for four wins.
Call me a homer, I’ll take the over on Rolovich.