[ UH FOOTBALL ]
Florida Atlantic
‘evacuates’ to Hawaii
for timely trip
The Owls leave behind a
hurricane threat to face the
Warriors in the season opener
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Before a final home late night practice, coach Howard Schnellenberger spent the afternoon boarding up his house on the beach near the Boca Raton campus, in preparation for a hurricane.
"There's a mandatory evacuation affecting millions of people in Miami, Fort Lauderdale. They're saying if anything takes a direct hit it'll be under 10 feet of water. It's still about a day out, so it won't affect our practice or flight," Schnellenberger said in a phone interview.
The Owls were still more than a day away from Hawaii, and the veteran coach was getting his team ready for the longest trip by far most of them have ever made.
"I think it's safe to say most of us haven't been out there," senior quarterback Jared Allen said yesterday by phone. "It's also safe to say we're really looking forward to it."
Schnellenberger, who took teams to Japan when he was coach at Miami and Louisville, said his team would go to sleep at 3 a.m., get up at 6 a.m., and try to sleep on the 10-hour flight from Fort Lauderdale to Hawaii via Los Angeles.
"A big advantage (the Hawaii players) have is biorhythms. For us it's like we're playing the game at midnight, so we have to get used to that," Schnellenberger said.
The Owls, going into their fourth season of existence, are 19-point underdogs. If FAU loses, Schnellenberger won't use travel or weather as an excuse.
"I don't think (Hawaii has) played a team coming from a subtropical climate. Teams from San Diego, Los Angeles, those are more desert areas where you have a dry cool in the evening. Our weather's similar to Hawaii," he said.
Like the Warriors with Heisman Trophy darkhorse candidate Tim Chang, the quarterback is the focal point of the Owls. Allen is one of 10 FAU players to have appeared in every game since the team's 2001 inception. He also threw at least one touchdown pass in all 14 games last fall.
"I sure do," Schnellenberger said when asked if the 6-foot-3, 215-pound Allen has pro potential. "He's somewhere between (Jim) Kelly and (Bernie) Kosar. He's tough-minded, understands the offense very well and has a strong arm."
Allen is from Edmond, Okla., and was recruited by Oklahoma, but the Sooners did not offer him a scholarship.
"I'm glad they didn't," said Schnellenberger, who found out about Allen through assistant head coach Kurt Van Valkenburgh, a friend of Allen's high school coach.
"We liked what we saw, sent him some information and invited him down. I committed to him and he to us. I knew if he went back to Oklahoma without a commitment other schools would find out about him and we'd lose him," Schnellenberger said.
Allen said he loved the idea of being part of a new program from the beginning.
"I knew it would be exciting, and also there'd be growing pains, and there were," he said. "Two years ago when we had a rough year (2-9), not knowing how to react to adversity hurt us. Last year, we put it all together. Now we expect to win and we hunger for it."
Last fall, FAU went 11-3 in its final I-AA season and served notice it is ready to compete in Division I-A's Sun Belt Conference. And no one knows the upper limit, since Schnellenberger salvaged Miami's struggling program and turned it into a powerhouse. He's been part of four collegiate national championships, as well as an undefeated NFL team (offensive coordinator of the 1972 Miami Dolphins).
"We're all really pumped up for our final season," Allen said of the Owls' first senior class. "And when it's done, we'll always be able to look back on the whole experience as something special, a privilege."
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