On most football Fridays the big screen is filled with video of the Georgia Southern Eagles’ opposition for the next day.

Not tonight, though, when the late show in the coaches’ conference room in Statesboro, Ga., features the ‘Iolani Raiders and Waipahu Marauders battling for the First Hawaiian Bank/HHSAA Division II state championship.

“We’ve got a bye (in the FCS national playoffs),” said Sean Saturnio, who until last year was Waipahu’s head coach and is now a graduate assistant at Georgia Southern. “Jeff will be watching with me. Remember, he’s got a Hawaii tie, too.”

“Jeff” is Jeff Monken, GSU’s second-year head coach. Saturnio and Monken are both alumni of the University of Hawaii, where they learned the basics of the spread option offense from its most prominent practitioner, Paul Johnson, now the head coach a few miles west on I-16 at Georgia Tech.

Monken and Saturnio met more than 20 years ago in a room at Manoa similar to the one in Georgia where today they’ll watch a Hawaii high school game. It was a friendship born in youthful poverty.

“I worked in the weight room,” says Saturnio, who had been a walk-on slotback at UH. “I was still taking classes and didn’t have a computer, so I’d use the one in the coaches’ work room. Jeff slept on a futon in there and we became friends.”

The young budding coaches from Hilo and Joliet, Ill., remained in touch over the years and decades. Saturnio became a teacher at Waipahu and Monken’s stops included stints with Johnson at Navy and Georgia Tech before taking over at GSU last year.

Saturnio, 44, received one of 50 sabbaticals offered by the DOE last spring and immediately plunged into an extended mainland stay for the first time since two years of college at Beloit, Wis., in the late 1980s.

“I found out I got it May 31. By June 14, I had to be up here to work camps. Today (Thanksgiving) is rough,” Saturnio said Thursday. “It’s my first holiday away from my kids.”

Southern hospitality’s resemblance to the aloha spirit and the sweet onions from nearby Vidalia similar to the Maui strain are among the few reminders of home. Usually he’s too busy to get too homesick. Saturnio says 80 hours constitutes a normal work week as director of player development and offensive quality control assistant, plus 20 to 25 hours a week of graduate-level courses. “I’m happy to report I’m 4.0 in the three classes,” he says.

Georgia Southern (9-2) has this week off thanks to a bye in the playoffs, earned with a Southern Conference championship. The Eagles trailed Alabama by just 10 late in the third quarter before falling 45-21 to the No. 2 team in the nation.

“More points and yards than anyone else against ’Bama this year, FCS or FBS,” Saturnio points out. “Bryant-Denny Stadium was incredible. And we have a great tradition, here, too. You know, people tell you football’s a religion in the South. But you don’t really know it until you’re here.”

Tonight, though, Saturnio will be back home. “My heart tells me 14-10, Waipahu. Guessing is free. Why not? I’ll be cheering for the Marauders like there’s nothing else.”

And that’s what it will be for a couple of hours in Statesboro, Ga.