The college football season starts tommorrow with Hawaii playing Southern California at Aloha Stadium!
But the off-season had plenty of action too!
1) The Big 10 and the Pac-10 wanted to expand!
The Big 10, whose territory stretches from Pennsylvania to Iowa, considered expanding East (adding teams from the Northeast) or West (adding teams from the Great Plains). The Big 10 (which already had 11, NOT 10 teams) just decided to have a 12th team in Nebraska!
The Pac-10, which is short for Pacific 10, not only had teams from California, Oregon and Washington (all of which touch the Pacific Ocean) but also from Arizona (which doesn't even touch an ocean at all). The Pac-10 decided to add more teams from landlocked states, adding Colorado and Utah! They even considered going even further away from the Pacific Ocean, offering invites to teams from Texas & Oklahoma. They declined!
The Western Athletic Conference (WAC) currently has Hawaii, Fresno State, San Jose State, Nevada, Idaho, Boise State, Utah State, New Mexico State and Louisiana Tech!
Boise State decided to leave the WAC for the Mountain West after this upcoming sports season! Then Fresno State and Nevada plan to follow!
So, the schools with the top football programs are leaving the WAC.
That leaves Hawaii alone with schools with weaker reputations!
So now what?
2) Some say Hawaii should lobby to join the Pac-10!
UH fans would LOVE to play the Pac-10 teams every year! The UH teams wouldn't have to travel as far for road trips! The UH would be among the big-time programs.
But the Pac-10 isn't interested! Pac-10 only wants big-time teams! UH hasn't even won enough conference championships! UH loses to Boise State way too many times!
UH fans sometimes emphasize that "Hawaii would be good for the Pac-10 because Hawaii is the gateway to Asia".
Yes, UH has marketed to Japan! Yes, Hawaii got Asian cultural connections! But guess what? So do the schools in the Pac-10! Let's not forget the West Coast also got large Asian populations.
The Bay Area got way more Chinese people than Hawaii does! So Cal and Stanford could easily outmarket UH in China!
LA got way more Korean people than Hawaii does! So USC and UCLA could easily outmarket UH in Korea!
Hawaii's Asian population is mostly Japanese and Filipino, so that is where UH could concentrate its Asian marketing on!
3) Some say UH should leave the WAC and just be "independent", no conferences!
Don't these people even remember 2007?
That year, UH had hard time filling its football schedule!
Then UH Athletic Director Herman Frazier got a lot of criticism over that!
But some things were out of his control!
UH was scheduled to play Michigan State that year. But Michigan State canceled that game, and bribed UH with $250,000 into accepting that game's cancellation!
Frazier attempted to schedule the season's opening game at the other big university in the state of Michigan. That's right, Frazier attempted to schedule UH to play the University of Michigan at its huge stadium at Anne Arbor. Michigan refused to play UH, and decided to play an even lesser-known school Appalachian State. Ironically, Appalachian State pulled a historic upset at that game!
Because of those scheduling difficulties, Frazier had to schedule small-time teams from Northern Colorado and Charleston Southern!
Frazier already had 8 games guaranteed, due to WAC affiliation. He just had to fill in 4-5 more games! Even that was difficult!
If Frazier had difficulty getting 4 more teams to play UH, what makes you think UH would have an easy time scheduling all 12 or 13 games by itself as an independent school?
Many college teams don't want to travel all the way to Hawaii! Too far, too expensive, too time-consuming!
And if the team wants to play in this so-called"national championship" bowl game, they'll usually need to be undefeated! Do you think those teams would want to travel all the way to Hawaii, where they might lose? No, because if they lose, they'll lose the prestige of being invited in this so-called "national championship" bowl game!
Remember that, next time a Boise State, TCU, Hawaii, etc has an undefeated season, and you hear critics whining "who did they beat?" Hello, big name teams refuse to play them! Big name teams play non-conference teams ONLY if they're mega-junk teams! That's why you usually see big name teams schedule home games against San Jose State or New Mexico State, instead of Boise State or Texas Christian!
UH needs to be in a conference! If it means stay in the WAC, then stay in the WAC!
That also means UH would have less excuse for not winning more conference championships more often! Win those conference championships plenty of times, beat some major non-conference games, THEN Hawaii could get invited to a major conference!
Go Warriors!
