---

Now the big games
really begin

"Monorail! ... Monorail! ... Monorail! ... Monorail!"

-- The Simpsons

YOU can almost feel the steady drumbeat, the constant rhythm, the relentless theme pounding somewhere in the back of your brain:

Idaho.
Idaho.
Idaho.
Idaho.

Oh, football practice at UH looks laid-back, as usual, during this bye week. But if there isn't an underlying sense of urgency, there should be.

We're heading into Idaho week.

Yes, you read that right. Even if that looks and sounds and feels, somehow, so blasphemous. So Bizarro World. So very, very wrong.

Yes, now there is an Idaho week.

Believe it. Forget national champion USC and on the road in the Big Ten at Michigan State. This next one is the season's biggest game. By far.

Idaho.

Yes, Idaho, as strange as that may be.

I can't quite wrap my brain around it. Of course, a program like Hawaii should beat Idaho, should roll over Idaho. This should be a score-40-and-get-out-of-town.

But for this Hawaii team, this season, with all that is at stake, this game looms huge.

And this is a different Idaho, it seems. One a little less Sun Belt-ish. Not quite so Big Sky. A little less only-recently-Division I-AA.

The Vandals opened the season by playing tough at Pac-10 Washington State, then almost pulled it out at UNLV.

A UH assistant, after watching the film, said he doesn't know how Idaho lost those games.

(You -- with the joke about one team scoring more points than the other -- out. Leave the room now.)

Idaho's quarterback was just named Western Athletic Conference offensive player of the week. That would be the new quarterback, Steve Wichman, the guy brought in to beat out last year's starter. (That would be Joey Harrington's brother, who only completed better than 65 percent of his passes last season, second-best all-time at UI.)

Yes, this looks like an upgraded Idaho team.

"They look like a team with a lot of discipline," Hawaii linebacker T.J. Moe said.

"They look real good," offensive guard Brandon Eaton said. "Way better than last year."

Idaho was even, early, last year at UH, if you recall. But then it fell victim to Tim Chang and its own Sun Belt-ness on the way to a much-needed 52-21 Hawaii win. Those were the respective levels the two teams were on.

As I wrote that night about the two banged-up squads: "Hawaii's freshmen and fourth-stringers were physically superior to Idaho's freshmen and fourth-stringers."

"I just watched us play Idaho last year," defensive coordinator Jerry Glanville said this week. "If I'd have watched that film I never would have taken the job."

It was a laugh line.

But he wasn't lying.

Now it's a new year and the cupcake is a little more fully baked, and this game has "ambush" written all over it.

It's on the road and in September. And in recent seasons that's two strikes right there.

Idaho's first home game, its first WAC game. A packed house in a mini-dome, a tiny dome, a Thunderdome.

Have you ever been in a small dome? Let's put it this way -- collegegridirons.com says the Kibbie Dome has "seating on both sides of the gridiron."

There's nowhere for the sound to go. It's like someone screaming at you in a phone booth.

There's nowhere for the air to go. It's stuffy. Extra sweaty. Suffocatingly, claustrophobically hot.

The air itself is unnatural, the atmosphere, too. It's surreal.

Kind of like the fact that the biggest game of the year is against ... Idaho. (But of course it is.)

"We haven't won a road game in what," asked Eaton, "a year and a half?"

I didn't know. But Eaton did.

A loss would be devastating. This game is huge.

Of course, everyone at UH is feeling upbeat. The fans saw the first two games as moral victories. Hawaii seems to have found a quarterback, kept the ball away from MSU. You would think every other game should be easy after playing USC and Michigan State.

"I think actually a lot of it was mental errors," Moe said. "I'm not going to take anything away from the teams we played -- of course they won. So we've got to give everything up to them. But I think if we minus our mental mistakes, I think there's going to be a whole different story and some people might not even recognize it was the same team when we cut down on the mental errors."

Sounds good. And when these two programs meet, UH should roll it up just by showing up. But we're in the Bizarro World now.

If they know what's good for them they'll hear the drumbeat. Idaho. Idaho.