It’s time to upgrade schedule for ’Bows

Now that this NCAA business is behind it and the University of Hawaii’s men’s basketball roster is flush with returnees and soon to have a full complement of scholarships, can we finally get back to a representative schedule?

One without, say, Arkansas-Pine Bluff or Prairie View?

As the Rainbow Warriors look toward an enhanced team for the 2017-18 season, it is also an opportune time to resolve to upgrade the schedule. It has certainly been a while.

According to an NCAA report, the ’Bows played the 260th-toughest Division I schedule (out of 351 schools) this season, their weakest in more than a decade.

Part of the reason, of course, was that their ranks were depleted by transfers amid the NCAA sanctions that had hung over the program. Fair enough, as far as 2016-17 goes.

But what about the rest of the current decade?

Even if you take away this year, it has been seven years since the men’s basketball program has played a schedule ranked even among the upper 50 percent for competitiveness. Its average rank for the period has been 223rd.

To put that in perspective, Bob Nash, four coaches ago, last broke a ranking of 180 or better with a 94th in the 2009-10 season.

Perhaps the fact that it also turned out to be Nash’s last season as coach inspired his successors — Gib Arnold, Benjy Taylor and Eran Ganot — to dilute their schedules.

The Rainbow Wahine, meanwhile, have struck a challenging balance under Laura Beeman and her predecessor, Dana Takahara-Dias, with a schedule that ranked an average of 108th. Mike Trapasso’s baseball teams have played a schedule that averaged 81st over the previous four years. It is 54th this week.

So, it can be done, when there is the vision and the will.

Naturally, the UH men’s basketball coaches always have their reasons — both real and creatively spun — to justify this. Young team, new coach, leap year, planets not aligned, you name it.

Too often, however, it has boiled down to the coach, whoever he has been, either trying to trigger a bonus provision in his contract or get a rollover extension the easy way. So much so that scheduling from the pastry menu has become the normal.

Now, nobody is saying UH has to, or even should, run a gauntlet the likes of Big West Conference peers UC Santa Barbara and Long Beach State, who annually play some of the toughest nonconference schedules compiled by midmajor programs. This season they were both in the top 10 of challenging schedules nationally entering conference play. But the ’Bows don’t have to be annual bottom feeders, either. There is no requirement to double up on Division II opponents.

The ’Bows are fortunate to do well enough at home that they don’t have to venture far afield for paychecks like so many of the teams they fly in as guaranteed win fodder. You know, the usual have-team, will-travel suspects such as Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Delaware State, Prairie View, etc.

In fact, UH has ventured out of the state just once in the preconference over the past two seasons. And it has even coughed up big bucks to buy its way out of two games — road contests at San Diego State and California — in the 2015-16 Las Vegas Invitational for $120,000.

After the end of NCAA purgatory, things are looking up for the ’Bows’ future.

It is about time — past time, really — that their schedules do, too.

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