Ferd Lewis: Will UH’s hot start bring crowds back to Halawa?

With each victory it accumulates, the University of Hawaii football team re-opens frontiers not reached in years.

At 5-1 — and as the only 2-0 team in the Mountain West Conference after Saturday’s five overtime 44-41 victory at San Jose State — the Rainbow Warriors are closing in on bowl eligibility, which is two victories away.

But in the on-the-field march to their first winning season in eight years, progress at the turnstiles has yet to keep pace.

As the Warriors return home for Saturday’s game with Wyoming, you wonder if the 30,000 threshold in attendance, once as seemingly automatic as turning on the lights, will finally be crossed again?

It has been 28 home games, all the way back to the 2014 season opener against 25th-ranked Washington, since 30,000 or more have made their way through the turnstiles in Halawa. It has been 11 seasons, the regular-season finale of the 2007 Sugar Bowl campaign, since UH enjoyed its last sellout.

UH hit 27,284 for this year’s home opener against Navy, but then dropped back to 21,954 for Rice and picked up just slightly for Duquesne (23,800).

San Jose State, which announced a gathering of 16,363 for Saturday’s game at CEFCU Stadium, would do handstands for those numbers. But, then, the Spartans don’t have to pay travel subsidies or cross the Pacific Ocean six times a year on their own dime, either.

Things have been so tough for Hawaii in recent years that, by the tenant’s request, Aloha Stadium has stopped selling seats in the yellow and red end sections in the north and south end zones.

They are seats that seldom show up on the TV camera view, but they do in the UH budget bottom line where they are the difference between barely getting by and paying a lot more of the bills.

Between them, that’s 7,324 seats — almost 15 percent of the stadium’s listed 50,000 seat capacity — that isn’t even put up for sale each game.

Not that there has exactly been a clamoring for them.

By holding back those sections, UH saves $1,360 per game in staffing (usher) and clean-up costs, according to officials.

Athletic director David Matlin said he’s doesn’t anticipate opening them up this week either but said, should interest dictate, that decision “could be made on the fly.”

Meanwhile, in hopes of seeing crowd size rise, stadium officials have been on the hunt for additional satellite parking around the facility in the stadium mall area.

There has also been added interest from prospective new food vendors the Stadium Authority was told.

“We’re pretty excited about (Hawaii’s) success,” stadium manager Scott Chan said. When UH makes money, so does the stadium, which is charged by the state with generating its own operational funding.

“We’re hoping that will bring more fans out and we’re looking to see what we can do to accommodate our guests,” Chan said.

Slotback John Ursua said, “With the conference all started, this is when the football really gets serious. The more we win, the closer we get to our goal, which is to win the Mountain West Conference this year.”

Linebacker Jahlani Tavai said, “the bigger the crowd, the more we get pumped up, too. You saw what they (the vocal Hawaii faithful at the San Jose State game) did. We fed off that.”

Both the players and budget balancers would like to dine off continued victories.