Lamar University football coach Ray Woodard hopes his underdog Cardinals can deflate the Aloha Stadium crowd early in Saturday’s game against Hawaii.

“What you would really like to do in a situation like that is play well early and try and take the crowd out of it a little bit,” Woodard said today on the Southland Conference coaches teleconference.

“I know we are going to have to play well for four quarters, but we really want to play well early and try and maybe not take their crowd totally out of it but calm them down a little bit,” Woodard said. “We did not do that over at Louisiana Lafayette. We did just the opposite.

They fed off of us and we really helped their crowd out by giving them the football and doing some things we can’t do.”

The Cardinals struggled early and lost 40-0 before a crowd of 25,803 at Lafayette in the season opener.

Lafayette and UH are the only NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision teams on Lamar’s schedule this season.

Lamar is 1-1.