[ UH FOOTBALL ]
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Southern California's Matt Leinart was brought down by Hawaii's Houston Ala in the first half in Los Angeles. A breakdown on defense for UH led to yesterday's loss.
Broken tackles,
broken schemeHawaii's defensive plan
is undone when it forgets how to hit
LOS ANGELES -- The 1999 football season was not all magical for Hawaii. It started out ugly. Really ugly, against Southern California.
In losing 61-32 to fourth-ranked USC yesterday, the Warriors gave up the most points they've yielded since they lost 62-7 to the Trojans to open the season -- and June Jones' tenure as Hawaii head coach -- five years ago.
The Warriors were often out of position yesterday, and it told in the statistics. Although they only had the ball for 27 minutes and 17 seconds, the Trojans rolled up 418 yards.
Jones said it should have been less, and would have been if UH hadn't missed so many tackles.
"The defensive line looked like they played pretty well for most of the game," Jones said. "They're (USC's playmakers) good, but everybody is. That TD that (Mike) Williams had, he must have broken about four tackles."
Then there was a screen pass from Matt Leinart to Reggie Bush while the Trojans were in the middle of their 28-point second quarter rampage.
Bush didn't like what he saw on the play and reversed his field, a la Marcus Allen in Super Bowl XVIII. Leinart, blocking for Bush, nailed UH cornerback Abraham Elimimian with the biggest hit of the day.
"That was a linebacker KO'ing a punt returner," USC coach Pete Carroll said.
Bush ended up with a 28-yard play and respect for his quarterback.
"Leinart threw a great block for me," Bush said. "I didn't even see him coming."
"(Elimimian) saw me coming, but he probably didn't think I was going to hit him," Leinart said. "I just put my shoulder down. It gave us a little spark and the crowd got into it."
Elimimian will be teased about getting knocked off his feet by a quarterback, and he was beat deep and got called for interference. But he isn't embarrassed about the rest of his game yesterday.
"I thought the secondary played pretty well most the game," he said. "But we had a hard time with our underneath coverages and we weren't picking up the crosses. Their running game hurt us a lot. I must have had eight tackles on running backs."
He finished with seven total, team-high for the game. It's usually not a good sign when a cornerback is the top tackler.
"They ran the ball better than their other games," said Kelvin Millhouse, UH's other starting cornerback. "We had eight in the box, but we missed some tackles. The team that runs the ball well opens up everything. We game-planned to take the run away, but they were able to run. Then they could do what they want."
Linebacker Keani Alapa said the Warriors finished strong, although he did realize it was against USC's backups.
"They just got us in that second quarter," he said. "We never gave up and that's a positive.
"They definitely deserve their No. 4 spot."
Millhouse refused to use the crutch of having played only one game.
"The bye? That might have hurt us in some way. But that's no excuse. We had two weeks to prepare, and you don't forget how to tackle in two weeks."
