The next call that University of Hawaii athletic director David Matlin gets could well be from his football coach’s agent.

That’s if the call hasn’t already been received.

Not a hard sell at this point, mind you, but perhaps just a friendly reminder from the folks at The Legacy Agency that UH might want to start socking away some moolah for what is looking, with each victory, more and more like an inevitable contract boost for Nick Rolovich.

That the Rainbow Warriors are at 3-0 and off to their best start since the Sugar Bowl-bound 2007 season, could make for some interesting discussion in coming weeks if UH continues to pile up the victories.

As Jeff Monken, the head coach of Army, UH’s next opponent, put it at his Saturday postgame press conference “We have a really, really good football team coming in here next that everybody is talking about …”

For a team that Las Vegas oddsmakers had pegged the over-under on victories at 3.5 this season, the ‘Bows are, indeed, generating interest for both their escalating win total and the explosive way they have gone about dispatching their victims.

UH got Rolovich for a bargain basement — as Football Bowl Subdivision head coaches go, anyway — price. His $400,008 salary was easily the lowest in the 12-member Mountain West Conference when he signed on the dotted line in 2015 for four seasons.

At the time, based on figures in the annual USA Today salary survey, Rolovich would have ranked 127th among 130 FBS head coaches.

Since then it appears he is losing ground. Not only have new, younger head coaches come into the MWC with instantly better deals that top the $425,004 that contract terms say he is due this year and next, but lower end schools in minimal cost of living areas, such as Las Cruces, N. M., are finding ways to pad their coaches’ wallets.

Mindful of UH’s limited financial means and happy to have a head coaching job at his alma mater, the money wasn’t the main thing when Rolovich initially signed on.

But in the intervening years he’s undoubtedly also come to see the extensions and raises handed out elsewhere.

As the listed Nov. 29, 2020, completion date of his first contract (an extension clause on the original 2019 date was triggered by the first-year bowl appearance) approaches, this is an opportune time for Rolovich to make his case for a raise and multi-year extension. In that, 2018 shapes up as a potential payoff year.

Administrators like to say that they’ll evaluate coaches at season’s end blah, blah, blah. But circumstances create their own urgency. You need look no further than this year when it was announced in April that baseball coach Mike Trapasso would receive a multi-year extension.

UH was 21-15 (7-5 in the Big West) at the time with a significant portion of its schedule still to play with only the duration (two years or three) left to be determined.

Of course, at UH, where the bureaucracy has been known to move at molasses speed, getting a running start on contracts has often been advisable in the past.

In the meantime, while Rolovich makes his case in the win column, it would behoove his employers to work on raising the requisite funding.

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