Dave Reardon: Hawaii football coach Todd Graham proving to be bad hire but hard to fire

A winning record the first year and making it to a bowl game the second used to be considered a pretty decent start for a new coach of a college football team.

But times have changed and so have expectations. They now include keeping the players happy or at least treating them with enough respect to keep them from transferring.

So the University of Hawaii football program is officially broken.

Again.

It’s been screwed up before, worse than this. I don’t blame you for repressing the memories, but it’s good to not forget that UH recovered from the hopelessness of the Fred vonAppen and Norm Chow eras.

They were horrible times for Hawaii fans. But the program was eventually fixed, in both cases, via a coaching change. There was June Jones and the greatest turnaround in college football history in 1999, and then, in 2015, UH went from rock bottom to Pride Rock with Nick Rolovich.

So, I get it. There’s precedent for you to believe that all you need to do is change the coach, and voila. Magic.

But it’s not that easy, especially in Manoa where money does not grow on the banyan trees, and stadiums are like starting quarterbacks — if you’ve got two, it really means you don’t have any.

Although it’s tempting with yet another loss of a star player to the transfer portal, I can’t get myself to advocate for what a lot of you say you want — not quite yet, anyway.

I was on a break from sports columns, writing about food two years ago, so only a few witnesses know that I thought Todd Graham was a bad choice to replace Nick Rolovich.

The really sad thing here is that when Graham was hired, the Rainbow Warriors didn’t need fixing. Rolovich was leaving for a better job after a winning season. An internal hire, like when Bob Wagner replaced Dick Tomey when he was plucked away by Arizona, would have stood a better chance of success. Or, someone with more experience with the culture here than one Hawaii Bowl win.

I always loved that story about a local player who said one of the reasons he chose UH is because Jones knew to take off his shoes before entering his home.

This sounds provincial, but guess what? For better or worse, that’s what we are.

Rolovich and his staff had recruited plenty of young, talented players who were comfortable with the way he ran things. Darius Muasau, the two-time all-conference linebacker and co-captain from Mililani who announced his intention to transfer on Tuesday, was among them.

Now he’s on his way out, along with several other of the team’s best players.

With all that being said, I must be in the fire Graham camp, or maybe even the one that says fire athletic director David Matlin too, for hiring him, right?

Sorry, folks I won’t join you quite yet — unless you want to give me a couple of million dollars, and I’ll make sure to run it right over to the chairman of the Department of Buyouts at Manoa … I’d just need to make a quick stop at my credit union first to deposit my service charge.

Many people get UH mixed up with those Power Five programs that have the financial wherewithal to instantly erase errors with massive payoffs.

Reality, as it stands at this moment, is that unless they have been found in gross negligence of their duties as described in their contracts or broken laws, Matlin and Graham aren’t getting fired.

As bad as some of the allegations are of how Graham has talked to and treated players in ways that are crude and outdated, unless there’s more and it’s verified and not anonymous, it doesn’t add up to firing him for cause — or for the $1.2 million it would cost to pay him to go away without having to state a reason.

Matlin is one of the sincerest and hardest-working people I know. He did make a mistake by hiring a coach with no Hawaii ties who would have to follow Rolovich, a program legend as a player with a fun unko personality as a coach.

I don’t think Matlin ignored the obvious red flags two years ago, but that he saw positives in Graham he believed outweighed them.

Where some of us saw questionable loyalty in brief stops on his way up the ladder, Matlin saw an up-and-comer headed for bigger challenges.

Where we saw his years at Arizona State as declining success leading to getting fired, Matlin saw the winning records of his early seasons in the Pac-12.

Where we saw a guy with no personal stake in Hawaii, the AD saw an experienced head coach who would adapt.

Maybe Graham would have adjusted better if not for the start of COVID-19 coinciding with the beginning of his tenure at UH, and the ridiculous stadium situation.

The question now is if Graham can and will change, since he has learned what being put on blast means. If he doesn’t, the sooner he finds another job, the better it will be for everyone. This is deja vu all over again, when each year we’d compute how much it would cost to excuse Chow. Graham’s buyout is half of his remaining contract, and goes down from $1.2 million to $800,000 after next season. If the fan base’s perception of the team doesn’t change for the better by then, that might be worth it.

Graham and Matlin both released statements Tuesday on Twitter. Within a bunch of verbiage about the transfer portal, both acknowledge they need to continue to work to get better at their jobs. It’s in there, if you look for it, and as disappointing as it may be for some of you, it’s the closest thing you’re going to get to blood right now.