Tonight’s University of Hawaii opponent, Lamar University, could represent something of an endangered species in Aloha Stadium.

Take a good look in the season home opener, because the underdog Cardinals from Beaumont, Texas, just might be one of the last of the parade of lower classification opponents you’ll see tangle with the Warriors for a while. Maybe for a long while.

After averaging one out-of-subdivision opponent a year for 14 seasons now, the Cardinals are the last NCAA Football Championship Subdivision opponent currently listed on the Warriors’ schedule that dips into 2020, officials confirmed.

That is, of course, subject to change in the fluid world of scheduling, but rarely since 1975, when UH was recertified as a Division I-A (now known as Football Bowl Subdivision) NCAA member, have we been able to gaze so far down future schedules and see such a paucity of out-of-classification opponents.

And not so much as a Charleston Southern, Central Arkansas or Northern Colorado among them. All of them FCS members whose scholarship ceiling is lower (63 compared to 85), and resources considerably thinner than the FBS world UH inhabits.

Whether another FCS foe finds its way into Halawa by 2020 (assuming the stadium is still standing then) figures to be largely up to coach Norm Chow and circumstance.

Chow, who has been getting input on future scheduling, has so far publicly embraced a play-the-best-to-become-the-best philosophy. Unless he decides to take a break, situations necessitate a late plug-in or a new athletic director dictates different, that’s the way things line up.

Consider that the 2013 nonconference schedule (USC, Oregon State, Navy, Army and BYU) is full. In fact, the school with the fewest scholarships on UH’s schedule next year will be, would you believe, USC, at 75.

The ’14 slate (Washington, Oregon State, Colorado and BYU) and ’15 schedule (Colorado, Washington, BYU and Navy) each have one nonconference opening and both FBS and FCS candidates to fill them. Overall, UH has 19 games booked into 2020 and all are currently against opponents in UH’s FBS category.

After running this year’s gauntlet and staring at that lineup, Chow, or whoever is calling the shots in the AD’s chair by then, might well decide an FCS opponent would provide a welcome break amid a 13-game schedule in ’14 or ’15 or beyond.

Indeed, where there was a once-upon-a-time snobbishness about deigning to play FCS opponents, nearly everybody now does. The only staunch holdouts among the current 124 FBS schools being Notre Dame, USC and UCLA.

Avoiding FCS opponents is something that is getting harder to do as bottom-rung FBS teams command higher guarantees from marquee schools. Arkansas State, for example, is getting $1 million to play at Nebraska today, while Louisiana-Monroe gets $1.05 million from Auburn after taking home $950,000 from Arkansas last week.

If Lamar is to be the last of its line for a while, it behooves the Warriors to make the most of the opportunity before them tonight.

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