The importance of a winning football season in 2018 just took on added urgency for the University of Hawaii.
It wasn’t as if the season that opens in — can it really be just — eight days now lacked for significant import or a pressing need for success, but the announcement of a three-game series with UCLA to begin in 2020 just ratcheted up the stakes several notches.
The lucrative deal, which remarkably brings the Bruins to Aloha Stadium in 2020 and dispatches the Rainbow Warriors to the Rose Bowl in ‘21 and ‘27 for a total of $1.5 million in paychecks, means it will be a decidedly uphill trek to break the current streak of seven years without a winning season, if it isn’t accomplished in 2018.
UH hasn’t managed a winning season since 2010, the longest drought in the school’s Division I history and one that looms larger on several levels with each passing season.
For all the challenges the ‘Bows face this year — and Las Vegas oddsmakers have established them as 14-point underdogs at Colorado State on Aug 25 and 17-point underdogs against Navy on Sept. 1 — things get tougher in subsequent years.
Consider that UH does not play an opponent from a Power Five conference this year, the first time they’ve had that kind of a scheduling respite in 17 years.
Not only could it be another couple of decades before that happens again, but the ‘Bows will play three Pac-12 teams each in the 2019 and ‘20 seasons. Thereafter it will be at least two Power Five foes on the schedule each season through at least 2024.
As an added hurdle in ‘21, UH will play seven games in opposing stadiums — the most in its Division I history — and just six home games. The ‘Bows will likely have to hit the road three times for nonconference games before they open Mountain West play in 2021.
Now, games against Power Five conference opponents aren’t automatic losses and, in the past, the ‘Bows have won some memorable ones. Just not many recently, with 13 losses in the last 14 meetings.
The gulf between Power Five schools and their less well-heeled Football Bowl Subdivision brethren, not just UH, is widening by the year, not shrinking. Revenue disparities of $20 million-$40 million or more annually — and the enhancements they can buy in facilities, stipends, meals, recruiting, coaching, transportation, staffing and other areas — have seen to that.
Which is part of why the Bruins can afford to write $750,000 checks for each UH visit to the Rose Bowl and accept $400,000 for their trip to Aloha Stadium, much better terms than the $600,000 UH got for the 2017 trip to Pasadena and a home game in the bargain.
And a glance at future schedules says the ‘Bows have now boldly bitten off more of a Power Five challenge than anybody else in the 12-member Mountain West Conference. Over the five-year span of 2019-23 UH is contracted to play 12 of the boys from the big bucks conferences while nobody else has more than nine. Boise State, meanwhile, has seven.
Sure, there are some Central Arkansas, Fordham, Portland State, Duquesne, Albany and others of the Football Championship Subdivision mixed in UH’s future, but this isn’t basketball, where they are aplenty.
UH has its work increasingly cut out for it in the future, which means there is no time like the present to put the losing streak behind it.