Dave Reardon: Hawaii football coach Todd Graham has history of sophomore year success

If you’re a University of Hawaii football fan, I’ve got good news and bad news for you.

Sorry — nothing on the can-we-even-go-to-the-games front yet.

To be precise, in this case, the word “news” actually means “analysis.” And by analysis, I mean looking at some data and seeing if we can gain some insight about what might or might not happen with UH football this season. I keep hearing that the greatest predictor of the future is the past.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the concept of the sophomore slump, and how it has affected the Rainbow Warriors the past 20 years or so. Not the players, but the coaches. This is worth exploring because Todd Graham is heading into his second year at the UH helm.

The bad news? The four head coaches previous to Graham posted worse records in their second year at UH than their first: June Jones (9-4 to 3-9), Greg McMackin (7-7 to 6-7), Norm Chow (3-9 to 1-11) and Nick Rolovich (7-7 to 3-9).

Three of them, like Graham, took Hawaii to a bowl game the first year. Two, again like Graham, won that bowl game — as you might recall, last Christmas Eve the Warriors beat Houston 28-14 in the New Mexico Bowl, and Hawaii finished its pandemic-abbreviated season at 5-4.

Of course, this by itself doesn’t mean UH won’t improve in Graham’s second season, which starts Aug. 28 at UCLA. Four is a very small sample size.

But there are some logical reasons why a college football team might not do as well in its second season under a new coach than it did the first.

The most relevant is that a change at the top can provide an instant, but temporary, morale boost for a team where losing had become a bad habit. This was the case in 1999 and 2016, when Jones and Rolovich took over for coaches who never came close to winning seasons in three and four years. Jones and Rolovich energized the players with a new team culture, and they learned how to win.

Building on that success the second year, though, is not as simple as it might seem. Coaches always tell us how hard it is to win. That’s true; but know what is even more challenging? Building the foundation of a program that will win consistently and improve, season after season.

In a coach’s second year, even more than the first, his recruits contend for starting positions with upperclassmen who were brought in by the previous coach. Competition is good, but this kind can create rifts and threaten team chemistry. This means that sometimes the second year is actually the transition year — the one with the most growing pains.

You’re more than ready for that good news now, aren’t you?

Here ya go: If Todd Graham ever suffered a sophomore slump, it was in something other than his experience as a college football head coach.

Again, small sample size. But in Graham’s two previous situations as a program’s second-year top man, at Tulsa and Arizona State, his teams finished with better records than in his first year.

And, no, it’s not like his first-year teams sucked. Quite the contrary.

In 2007, the Golden Hurricane went 10-4 in Graham’s first year at Tulsa. That was proven not to be pyrite, because in ’08 Tulsa went 11-3. Then came a 5-7 hiccup in ’09 … but you might remember the 2010 Tulsa team; that’s the one that ran past a very good Rainbow Warriors team 62-35 in the Hawaii Bowl.

Incidentally, Graham’s ’07 Tulsa team led the nation with 543.9 yards per game. To help put that in perspective, Hawaii was third with 512.1. Yes, that’s the year UH was 12-1, losing only in the Sugar Bowl, and Colt Brennan was third in the Heisman voting.

In 2012, Graham debuted at Arizona State and led the Sun Devils to their first winning record in five years — 8-5 including a bowl win. The next year? ASU went 10-4, including 8-1 in the Pac-12.

So, if you go by his track record, there’s no reason to expect a decline after that solid first year, which came under some very trying circumstances.

Yes, winning college football games is hard. Last year, even getting to play them was. UH stepped up to the new challenges and uncertainty of playing a season during the pandemic, better than most programs around the country; the Warriors were one of just two Mountain West teams that avoided COVID-19 well enough to play all of its games (the nonconference games were canceled, which was out of UH’s control).

That’s a positive reflection on the entire program — an indicator of hard work by support staff, maturity among the players and leadership from the coaches.

A head coach with a new team who navigated 2020 that successfully might indeed be immune to a sophomore slump.