UH provides more
good and bad news

FOR the second straight game Hawaii gives us a good news-bad news situation.

The good news is that, again, this loss is legit. Hawaii did not drop the game or give it away or shoot itself in the foot. There were no needless interceptions or stupid penalties at bad times. No coaching gaffes. UH didn't come out flat.

No, Hawaii was just beaten, straight up.

For the second time in as many tries, the opponent just made more plays. The opponent was simply the better team, that's all.

"They're going to do that against a lot of teams," June Jones said yesterday of Rice's impressive ground game. "Not just us."

It's true. Rice, it turns out, is a pretty decent team. Just as Florida Atlantic was a good team.

Of course, the bad news is that now we have to start to wonder that maybe, just maybe, UH isn't one.

Oh, I stick by my prediction that UH will get better as the season goes on. But the bad news is, now the schedule gets better, too (or it gets worse, depending on which word you'd like to use).

Hawaii should bounce back and beat Tulsa in two weeks at Aloha Stadium, no problem. The early scores haven't looked good for the Golden Hurricane. They were shut out by Navy. It looks like I was a fool to pick them to win the WAC.

But Tulsa also runs a ball-control, play-action pass offense, and last year Steve Kragthorpe put together a perfect game plan. How UH looks that night will say a lot.

Jones was in full spin cycle yesterday, which is good. It's what his team needs now. That's how you snap out of these things.

This only makes a comeback all the sweeter, he said. It's still early in the season, he said. He watched the film and saw lots of good stuff, he said. Bounces and inches have gone the other way.

Just a couple of tweaks, not much to fix.

"Just catching the football and tackling," he said.

Well, those are kind of big things.

Hawaii's defense was dominated at Rice. We all saw it. UH coaches made some smart adjustments, clamping down, adding a run blitz. But then Ken Hatfield countered, too. (Did you notice the touchdown that came immediately after a timeout?)

Eh, these guys come hard. But last year this defense had incredible talent, NFL talent, and still had good games and bad ones. Now ...

"We played hard," Jones said. "But we're not tackling and we're not laying leather."

OK. So every game might be an adventure. That's kind of scary, but it can be overcome if the offense is explosive enough. This one isn't, not yet. It might happen, but it hasn't.

"Twenty-nine points is not enough?" Jones challenged yesterday.

It wasn't, and it isn't and it probably won't be. Not in this year's improved WAC. The UH offense hasn't played badly -- Tim Chang has done a great job in throwing zero picks -- but the run-and-shoot has not gotten hot. Rice defenders played well enough to win.

Good news, UH was just beaten by a better team. That's the bad news, too.