UNIVERSITY of Hawaii football coach Fred vonAppen has an opportunity to change the face of modern college football. Viva la Rainbow
revolution!I've always believed that it's stupid for sports teams who have no chance of winning to suit up and play their opponents as if they were equally matched.
Just because Boy Scouts and Army Special Forces units both wear uniforms doesn't mean they are equal on the battlefield. And if Boy Scouts, or even a high school ROTC detachment, were forced to take on the Green Berets in battle, you know they'd get smashed.
And that's what happens in college football, where the diversity of skill for different schools is so broad -- even within the same divisions -- that it often gets down to a game between men and boys.
Now, this is not a criticism of the UH. The reality is that this year's team seems just a bit overmatched. I mean, when you get your butt kicked by a bunch of tag-football underachievers from Southern Methodist University, this ain't your season.
But this type of season provides vonAppen a fabulous opportunity. Since you know you are going to get beat, there's no reason to even pretend to be playing traditional football. It's time to come up with new, spectacularly incongruous plays.
If I were the coach, I'd high-tail it over to the university computer department and enlist the aid of the best computer programmer. I'd have him feed in all the college football rules, statistics on every player the UH will face and all of the plays, offense and defense, known to be used by the other teams.
Then I'd let the computer just crunch those numbers, probe all of the esoteric details of the game of football, explore the inherent -- though not necessarily visible -- strengths and weaknesses of each team and spit out the most wild, off-the-wall plays that modern technology can design.
What would opposing defenders think if they suddenly came across 11 UH players spread out all over the field while they were all clumped up in the middle of the field in a traditional array? Instead of a shotgun pattern, maybe the computer would come up with a double helix that befuddles defenders. What if the computer determined that the Rainbows stand a better statistical chance of scoring if they simply kicked the ball on first down and sent everyone down the field to try to recover it?
CRAZY, you say? It wasn't long ago that UH had an offense that depended almost exclusively on Jason Elam kicking field goals from 60 yards away. That happened in our last winning season. What if you had a team composed only of speed demons and guys who can kick the ball 70 yards?
I'm not a football expert. I don't even know all the rules. But it seems to me that we are modeling football play after an outdated military model in which there is one coach (general), a quarterback (colonel), a couple of backs (lieutenants), some wide ends (special forces) and big linemen (grunts).
What if play were modeled after guerilla warfare, where the opposition couldn't even be sure who the quarterback is going to be from play to play? What if, instead of huddles, the players just stood at the line of scrimmage and yelled revolutionary slogans at the opposing players until someone uttered a secret hike word like "Che Guevara?"
The idea is to come up with the most radical approach possible, one that confounds, confuses and ultimately leaves the other side in complete disarray, allowing your team to skip, run backward or hop like bunnies into the end zone.
As nutty as this might sound to football traditionalists, it sure couldn't make things any worse.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
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