Lamar aims to keep Hawaii crowd calm

The Lamar football team wants to turn down the intensity on the crowd Saturday at Aloha Stadium to have a chance 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," coach Ray Woodard said Tuesday on the Southland Conference coaches teleconference.

"On the flip side of that, you don’t want to have disaster strike early and give them even more of a reason to get energized," Woodard said. "You say that, but doing it is a lot more difficult than just saying it.

"I know we are going to have to play well for four quarters. But we really want to play well early and try and not maybe take the crowd totally out but calm them down a little bit by doing that."

The 1-1 Cardinals did not do that with four first-half turnovers in a 40-0 season-opening loss at Louisiana-Lafayette in front of the largest crowd (25,803) Lamar has seen since restarting its football program in 2010.

"We did just the opposite," Woodard said. "They fed off of us. We really helped their crowd out by giving them the football and doing some things that we can’t do."

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

Woodard said, "They (the Warriors) have, arguably, the best home-field advantage in football, with everything that goes into trying to play Hawaii. And they’ve (brought) a lot of good football teams out there and beaten ’em. We understand that part of it is gonna be tough."

But Woodard said, "We’re looking forward to the trip, and I think it is gonna be a great trip for the team. Most of them have never been in Hawaii."

Woodard said three coaches and "five or six" of the 60 players who will make the trip have been here before.

"We’re going to see the island and see Pearl Harbor and those kind of things," Woodard said. "We understand we’re going to go play a very good football team."