The first cut of the University of Hawaii’s fall football camp Friday was … the offensive coordinator, Aaron Price?

Welcome to a new chapter in the bizarre, even for UH, a school that once fired a winning basketball coach at the postseason banquet.

Coming off a 3-9 football season and trying desperately to sell new hope for 2013, one of the worst public perception moves an under-the-microscope head coach can make is a major staff change the first week of August.

About the only thing worse would be to do nothing with a badly deteriorating situation.

If you read between the lines, that looks a lot like the rock and hard place second-year head coach Norm Chow was coming from on this one.

Chow could take his lumps in front of a disbelieving court of public opinion by making a bold change to try to salvage things now — or sit on his hands and pray to the grid gods that the situation didn’t torpedo an entire season later.

Chow, if you take him and UH officials at their cryptic comments, apparently swallowed hard and chose the former.

While UH said Price hadn’t been fired and hasn’t resigned, yet curiously "is no longer with the football program," one thing is abundantly clear: Chow wanted a change and pronto.

"The need to move on," as Chow termed it, apparently deemed so compelling that the financially struggling athletic department said it will pay off Price’s six-figure contract through its March 2014 expiration and not hire a replacement.

The listed salary range for the position at UH is $116,640-$203,688, with Price believed to be at the bottom.

That kind of urgency points to something more than a clash of offensive philosophies or table manners. It suggests something beyond the bruising of egos that can divide an offensively steeped head coach and his coordinator. Especially a pair that had yet to call a game together or experience a finger-pointing loss.

When Price was made offensive coordinator less than six months ago, he talked of his decade-old "dream" to coach at UH. He was effusive about the "uncanny similarities we have as far as the belief in the program, and style of the program and how we do things." He paid his own way to come present his resume to Chow, who talked of the "excitement" of what they might accomplish together.

Yet Friday, Chow talked opaquely in terms of "circumstances (that) have arisen" and "a situation." Others alluded to "personal issues" entering the equation.

The kind of problems that, whatever they were, weren’t going to be overcome in time for a team that has precious little of it to squander with No. 24 USC on the horizon and No. 25 Oregon State the game after that.

Whether Chow failed to do his due diligence in hiring Price or things just went sideways thereafter, the need to make a change is clearly on the head coach.

But, then, so too would be the far bigger onus that could come later for not having taken responsibility now.

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