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There are 21 athletic teams at the University of Hawaii, and it might surprise you which one has yet to play a game that has been scheduled by its coach.
Not volleyball, not basketball, not tennis, soccer or water polo.
“I guess I’m the only one,” football coach Nick Rolovich acknowledged Saturday.
Rolovich is preparing for his fourth season as the Rainbow Warriors’ head coach, and none of the games they have so far played — or will play in 2019 — were signed on by him.
While college football schedules are pieced together further in advance than those of other sports, the 2019 slate is still something of a rarity in that it is a chop suey of sorts concocted by the participation of several different athletic directors.
So, while people wonder how it has come to be that the ‘Bows will be opening a season with three consecutive Pac-12 opponents for the first time in their 110 years, Rolovich just goes about playing what has been laid out for him until future years, when we begin to see his hand in the scheduling.
“I think David (Matlin, the athletic director) and I have an open dialogue on scheduling,” Rolovich said. “I feel like I’m heavily involved in scheduling decisions, it is just that most of them are coming in 2025, ’26 and ’27.”
The eight Mountain West Conference games are set each year, with UH adding four or five (in a 13-game season) nonconference games.
Rolovich said, “We know we’re going to have to play some of the big dogs. And I’m OK with going to play somebody like that for big money.”
Ideally on the nonconference portion, Rolovich said, “You want to play a big one, maybe one for the money or home-and-home for the fans here, that you’re an underdog against, one from the Football Championship Subdivision, where you’re favored, and a couple others you feel like you can consistently compete with.”
For the 2019 season, the Aug. 24 season opener with Arizona was contracted by Jim Donovan in 2012 as the first leg of a home-and-home series with the Wildcats that will send the ‘Bows to Tucson, Ariz., next season.
The Sept. 7 game with Oregon State was contracted by then-interim AD Rockne Freitas, an OSU alum, later in 2012.
The Sept. 14 game that packs the ‘Bows off to Washington was originally a centerpiece of the 2015 schedule when it was set up by Donovan in 2009. But when Ben Jay took over as AD in 2013 he asked the Huskies to push back the game to a mutual opening four years later so he could plug in Ohio State for a more lucrative payday.
UH got $1.2 million, its largest road check to date, for the 38-0 loss at the Horseshoe, three times what the Huskies were contracted to pay.
Jay, a Buckeyes alum with a budget deficit to overcome, was going to take UH home to Columbus. But by the time the game was played, he was no longer the AD.
Rolovich said this year’s Sept. 21 Central Arkansas game was scheduled “before I got here,” while the Nov. 30 regular-season ending game with Army, the final contest in a four-game home-and-home series with the Black Knights, was contracted by Donovan in 2009.
When rookie head coaches ask longtime former Kansas State head coach Bill Snyder for pointers on the job, one of the first things he tells them is “to get hold of the scheduling.”
Rolovich’s touch on the schedule may just take a little longer. “But I’m planning to be here for a while,” he said.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
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