Before suffering a knee injury that would reduce his 2019 season to four games, offensive lineman Kohl Levao was regarded as the Hawaii football team’s top prospect for the 2020 NFL Draft.
Levao is returning for his second senior year — he qualified for a redshirt in 2019 — and is expected to have a prominent presence on the Rainbow Warriors’ deep offensive line this coming season. Levao’s role? “I’m going to have him put his hand on the ground and knock people off the ball,” head coach Todd Graham said.
This has been a hectic period for Graham, who was hired as Nick Rolovich’s successor in January. In his four previous head-coaching jobs, Graham has never had to cobble together a recruiting class in three weeks and go through a spring semester without a single practice. Graham and his staff have conducted meetings on Zoom and monitored the players’ academics while evaluating personnel and implementing offensive and defensive schemes.
“We’re swamped trying to be on top of that,” Graham said.
But Graham has remained true to a baseline of aggressiveness and discipline — a theme that he hopes will be set by the offensive line, particularly physical blockers such as Levao.
“I think our guys up front are excited about the physicality we’re going to play with,” Graham said. “I’m looking forward to that group, and Kohl being one of the leaders of that group. I told him, ‘we’re going to run the ball downhill. We’re going to put our hand in the ground and knock people off the football, and be physical with what we’re doing.’ At the end of the day, that’s who wins: the team that whips the other team mentally and physically.”
The Warriors are three deep on the offensive line. The unit has seven seniors. Nine returning linemen started games last season.
The Warriors will be going with a self-styled “run and gun” offense, a mixture of rushes, quick-rhythm passes and deep routes set to a rat-a-tat tempo. In Graham’s vision, the offense will be both a boxer and slugger, a reflective version of a heat-seeking defense.
“We want to play offense with a defensive mentality, a disciplined defensive mentality,” Graham said. “And we want a physicality about it. We want yards after contact, yards after catch. We want to be able to run the ball downhill. We want to be physical.”
That approach, Graham noted, has been effective with his previous teams.
“We’ve always been able to have that type of edge, that type of mentality to us,” Graham said. “And I think that helps your ability to have one personality as a team, and not just an offensive personality and a defensive personality. Offense and defense is all one mind-set.”
But Graham also is stressing reducing penalties and turnovers. The Warriors averaged 61.2 penalty yards per game in 2019. Their turnover margin was minus-11.
“To me, if you’re 99th in the country in penalties, that’s not being real disciplined in what we’re doing,” Graham said. “That’s an area we need to improve dramatically. … The number one thing is instilling the discipline it takes to compete for championships. You’ve got to be extremely disciplined. It’s not like, ‘oh, we’re disciplined.’ It has to be elite discipline. We want to take a team that’s been successful and move them forward.”
