Must-win situation for UH and SJSU

THERE'S a lot of love in this room. Respect up and down, all over the place. It's true.

June Jones will be forever grateful to the guy who first gave him a shot in the coaching biz. Dick Tomey feels the same warm glow all mentors feel when their ex-students go on to great success.

All the assistants know each other. Colt Brennan's cousin coaches for San Jose State. Everybody knows everybody, and on a sunny Saturday in San Jose, Calif., it's going to be a feel-good game full of pre- and post- handshakes and hugs.

As Tomey said this week on the Western Athletic Conference coaches teleconference, "There's all kinds of players on his team that they're sons of guys I coached or cousins or whatever, so I think there's a lot of familiar faces."

Family reunions. Old home week.

Everyone is not only saying all the right things, but believing them, too. Feeling them. That's the best part.

Yes, that IS love in the air.

OK. Is that out of the way? Because this is going to be a heck of a football game.

JUNE JONES HAS to win this game. Has to. Bowl implications? Oh, yes, that, too. But mostly because his image is that this is the greatest era in Hawaii football history, that he is the one who is able to do things previous UH coaches have not.

So losing to Tomey is pretty much out.

That kind of turns things up a notch, doesn't it? Now, a one-game referendum isn't a fair test, a win or loss by either team in a "rebuilding" year for both wouldn't mean anything either way, really.

Except a few people might look up who this Tomey character is, and find out that there was a time before Fred "0-12" vonAppen, when Hawaii had winning seasons, wore the school colors (green and white), and a state was pretty excited about the whole thing (there were several consecutive seasons during which average attendance at Aloha Stadium was better than 40,000 for UH football home games).

(Saturday's Hawaii win over New Mexico State had a tickets-issued attendance of 29,002, with 24,775 actually in the stands.)

Now, after all that has been said and done these past seven years, Jones finds himself having to face the Ghost of Rainbows Past.

He has to win this game.

DICK TOMEY HAS to win this game, too. Has to. OK, so maybe it's not quite as bad on his end. He doesn't have to prove a point here. He's the winningest coach in the history of two schools and he's the underdog to boot.

But do you think he doesn't WANT this one?

"If there's one game Dick will have them really ready to play," a tired-sounding Jones told WAC media this week, "it will be our game."

You've got that right.

As he said in an ESPN sideline interview, during that great UH-Fresno State game in 2001, when asked which of his former assistants he was supporting -- Jones or Pat Hill -- it was easy: "There's a lot of my sweat and blood," in the Hawaii program.

That's why this game means so much.

And people are saying his Spartans "play hard." They "never give up." Tomey himself has said he is "not discouraged."

Do you know what all that means? It means the Spartans are 1-5.

It means there may not be many more. It means if you're going to win one game, just one, this would be the one.

He has to win this game.

THESE GUYS ARE so similar in certain ways. Tomey was the first to let UH fans dream big dreams. Jones has done everything he can to get those dreamers dreaming again.

Of course, you have to say Hawaii is the favorite. There's just more talent. Now, if Tomey had last year's SJSU team -- like that guy returning kicks for the Dallas Cowboys -- it might be a different story.

But no one will be as prepared to play Hawaii as Tomey will. No teams play harder than Tomey teams. No one has had the Hawaii game circled the way Tomey has (well, no one but John L. Smith).

You have to wonder if Jones has the edge in needing to win just a little more. To keep those dreamers dreaming. To keep his legend alive. He can't lose to a former UH coach.

He has to win this game.

They both do.

Sure, they love each other. But it's going to be a hell of a game.