IT'S Thanksgiving, and with a cornucopia of sports -- especially basketball -- on the menu, fans have a lot to be thankful for. It’s not easy to
be thankful for
UH footballCounting the Maui Invitational and the University of Hawaii Wahine Classic, more than 30 college basketball teams from the mainland have shown or will be showing their stuff this week. Before the nonconference season is over, 68 NCAA Division I men's and women's basketball teams will have played here.
Basketball fans can gorge themselves. But too much of a good thing is giving UH indigestion.
With Hawaii Pacific, Chaminade, UH-Hilo and BYU-Hawaii all inviting teams here to take advantage of the exemption rule first initiated by UH, the Rainbows are finding scheduling difficult. The NCAA has lumped all tournaments -- including those in Alaska and Puerto Rico -- together under the once-every-four-years limitation.
In other words, you can't return to Hawaii more than once every four years no matter which tournament you play in.
"We tried to get it separated from the others because we're the only Division I school," Rainbow coach Riley Wallace said.
HOWEVER, it isn't working out to UH's liking and its pool of quality schools to invite has shrunk dramatically.
Fortunately, UH doesn't have that problem in football.
So we have Michigan's football team in town to close out the Rainbows' 1998 season Saturday night. And boy, will the Wolverines be in for a shock. No, not on the football field.
Approximately 24,000 fans are expected for the game, or about 86,000 fewer than the Wolverines average at home.
They'll be even more shocked when the high school championship game at Aloha Stadium the night before draws a bigger crowd.
They're going to wonder what's going on and ask, "why are we here, playing this game?
Well, the Rainbows haven't always been this hapless.
They might not give Michigan even a semblance of a game. But in their heyday, they did. Michigan didn't put away Hawaii until the fourth quarter, winning 27-10 in 1986, the only previous meeting between the two teams.
Since then, the Rainbows have fallen on hard times. They're wandering in the football wilderness right now. It's the Dark Ages of UH football history.
Whether they'll ever see the light at the end of the tunnel remains to be seen.
A coaching change isn't the answer, as we have seen with Fred vonAppen replacing Bob Wagner.
BY hook or crook, UH has to be able to get better athletes into school if it wants to compete with the big boys.
OK, maybe not by crook. But one hook would be reinstituting the practice of admitting at-risk athletes and being more liberal in accepting credits from the California junior college system.
Wagner saw the handwriting on the wall when the likes of Maa Tanuvasa, Jesse Sapolu, Taase Faumui and Ivin Jasper wouldn't have been admitted after 1992. Adopting the policy was unilateral disarmament, according to Wagner.
UH is paying the piper with embarrassing losses in football.
So with an 0-11 team being served up as cannon fodder for Michigan, you'd think vonAppen wouldn't be in a thankful mood. He is.
"The family's healthy. I can be thankful for that," he said.
Me?
I'll be thankful when UH can be reasonably competitive in football, by whatever method it takes to get it done.
It certainly isn't an unreasonable request.