Rainbow Warriors turn attention to Navy

When it comes to appreciating the Hawaii football team’s season-opening victory, the sky was the limit.

Well, maybe an altitude of 30,000 feet.

During Sunday’s flight to Honolulu, the Rainbow Warriors received rousing applause from passengers when the chief flight attendant offered congratulations on the airplane’s public-address system.

By then, the Warriors had shifted their focus to Navy, this coming weekend’s opponent. After Saturday’s 43-34 upset of Colorado State in Fort Collins, Colo., video coordinator Oli Vea edited and uploaded footage of the game into a file-sharing system. The coaches reviewed video cut-ups of the game on their laptops during the six-hour, 45-minute flight from Denver to Honolulu. After returning to the UH campus, they spent the rest of the day studying videos and preparing for Navy.

The CSU video will show the Warriors made a smooth transition to the run-and-shoot offense (617 yards), cobbled an efficient offensive line (208 rushing yards, one sack in 37 pass plays), and found answers at quarterback.

Quarterback Cole McDonald, a third-year sophomore making his first NCAA start, accounted for five touchdowns — three on passes, two on designed bootlegs. He was 26-for-37 for 418 yards. He has not been intercepted or lost a fumble during his UH career.

Players usually abide by a 24-hour rule, a postgame window in which they can celebrate or lament an outcome. McDonald did not wait 24 minutes. Soon after the game ended, McDonald said: “I’m thinking ‘Navy.’ It was fun that we won, but if you go 1-12, what’s the point of winning the first game?”

Right wideout JoJo Ward and slotbacks John Ursua and Cedric Byrd provided accelerated route running in the four-wide offense. Byrd (181 receiving yards) and Ursua (123 yards) combined to average 16.9 yards per reception.

“I wanted to show everybody the run-and-shoot is back,” Byrd said of an offense revived at UH after a six-year hiatus. “The run-and-shoot is unstoppable. It’s a great offense to play in. You can never be wrong in this offense.”

McDonald and Byrd, who enrolled at UH in January, began learning the system at the start of the year. Ward joined UH a few days before the start of training camp. The learning curve was eased because many of the run-and-shoot’s read-and-attack concepts were used in the three-receiver sets last year. The run-pass option plays also were fused into Saturday’s game plan.

“Just what the coaches taught me,” McDonald said. “We had a game plan and we stuck to it, and we ran it, and we executed it.”

The UH defense appeared to tire in Fort Collins’ thin air. The Rams averaged 5.5 yards per play in the first 41 minutes, 25 seconds, and 14.5 yards in the final 18:35.

“The quarterback settled down in the second half,” defensive coordinator Corey Batoon said. “I thought we were doing enough in the first half to keep him off rhythm and getting ourselves off the field. The second half, we didn’t close it out the way we wanted to. I know the kids are disappointed, we’re disappointed. But it’s good to be disappointed and still get a win.”