One of the things you had to like about last season’s University of Hawaii football team from the beginning was the way the Rainbow Warriors squared up and defiantly spit Gatorade in the face of some long odds.
Six times the ’Bows were listed as consensus double-digit underdogs on the Las Vegas betting lines in 2018.
And three times, including two on the road, they came away with victories.
That’s something that hadn’t been accomplished in at least 18 years by a UH team and proved a difference in producing an 8-6 (5-3 Mountain West Conference) record that ended a streak of seven years without a winning season.
Fast forward to today’s 4:30 p.m. season opener at Aloha Stadium, where the ’Bows enter as 11-point underdogs to Arizona, a team they have yet to beat home or away. It is a line that has remained fairly steady since opening June 11.
Teams change with the seasons, and what the ’Bows do today and how they go about it figures to say a lot about how much carryover there is in personality and production from 2018.
We know that UH returns 20 starters from 2018, 19 of whom are expected to be on the field for this one. And for the first time in a long time, the coaching staff returns intact.
Arizona coach Kevin Sumlin will tell you that the ’Bows are also a function of who their head coach is. Sumlin — who is comfortable enough with his Hawaii counterpart to refer to him as “Rolo” — in his Monday press conference said, before catching himself, “I think you see (in) his football team that they are a reflection of him. They are tough, they are sound and I don’t know how many times they are going to throw (the football), but they aren’t going to back off that, either.”
At this point — and it is only the Week Zero start to the college football season, after all — there is potential for the ’Bows to be double-digit underdogs at least three times. In addition to the Wildcats today, the Sept. 14 game at 13th-ranked Washington and the Oct. 12 game at Boise State, where UH has never won, certainly line up as double-digit possibilities.
Depending on what Oregon State, UH’s Sept. 7 opponent, shows against Oklahoma State next week in the Beavers’ opener, or what Army has accomplished by the time the Black Knights renew acquaintances with the ’Bows in the Nov. 30 regular-season finale, there could be more.
To be sure, the ’Bows were a surprise team in 2018, and the potency with which they came out of the blocks with their re-imagined return to the run-and-shoot had a lot to do it.
They stunned Colorado State, a 17-point favorite they had lost to by 30 points at Aloha Stadium 11 months before, in Fort Collins, Colo., in the opener 43-34. Then they knocked off 13.5-point pick Navy 59-41.
Maybe CSU and Navy, who finished 3-9 and 3-10, just never recovered or weren’t all that good to begin with.
But in the regular-season finale they also went into San Diego, where they hadn’t beaten the Aztecs since 1988. As 16-point underdogs, UH pulled out a 31-30 overtime victory over the bowl-bound Aztecs.
Was it all a harbinger of what might come in 2019? We should soon find out.
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BEATING THE ODDS
UH as a double digit underdog in 2018
Odds | Favorite | Score
24.5 | At Fresno State | FSU 50-20
17.5 | Utah State | USU 56-17
17 | At Colorado St. | UH 43-34
16 | At San Diego State | UH 31-30 OT
13.5 | Navy | UH 59-41
10.5 | At Brigham Young | BYU 49-23
Source: vegasinsider.com
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
