Here it is barely two days after the final college football game of the 2012 season (is Eddie Lacy still running free?) and we are already hip-pad deep in the first wave of way-too-early Top 25 forecasts for the ’13 season.

To the surprise of no one who saw Alabama manhandle Notre Dame, the Crimson Tide top most of the projections.

What is of note, however, is that as many as five upcoming University of Hawaii opponents are being mentioned as Top 25 possibilities next season: Boise State, Oregon State, Southern California, Brigham Young and Fresno State. All of whom return starters of quality and in quantity.

Of course, USC was just about everybody’s preseason No. 1 heading into 2012, too. And the Trojans’ season ended buried somewhere beyond El Paso, in the Chihuahua Desert instead.

But, hey, if even part of the picks manage to hold up, it would mark a considerable — and welcome — step up from ’12, a season in which just one UH opponent, No. 18 Boise State (11-2), finished in the Top 25 of the Associated Press poll.

If the Warriors weren’t so hot in their 3-9 season of change, then neither, as it turned out, was the eventual level of opposition.

The NCAA ranked UH’s 2012 schedule 106th among 120 schools for degree of difficulty. Which wasn’t much. The Warriors’ foes had a 53-69 record against Football Bowl Subdivision opponents, a measly .434 winning percentage. It was the second lowest in the past five years, beating out the .353 (47-86) of 2011, when UH went 6-7 against a schedule ranked 120th.

And, yet, remarkably, the Warriors did not have the worst schedule in the Mountain West Conference.

Far from it, in fact. Four schools in the 10-member conference played a weaker lineup, including Boise State at No. 114. Which had a lot to do with why the Broncos did not crack the top 10 despite their 11-2 record.

For UH, at least, the degree of difficulty figures to change somewhat in ’13. Just how much remains to be seen by the amount of change in the MWC membership and scheduling shifts. Boise State will be back and, most likely, San Diego State, too. That’s on top of the addition of San Jose State and Utah State, both of which finished in the Top 25.

UH obviously won’t play them all, and just how the MWC will divide the opposition up in what could be a 12-member, two-division conference has yet to be decided.

One improvement is that, for the first time in eight years, UH is not scheduled to play a non-FBS opponent. That means no Lamar, UC Davis, Charleston Southern, Central Arkansas or others of that ilk.

Not even a South Alabama, which was a transitioning FBS member when it supplied the opposition in the 2012 finale.

The Warriors figure to be a better football team in ’13, and that is a good thing for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being their strength of schedule will finally be turned up a couple of notches, too.

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