Who's the faster QB candidate,Taylor Swift or Taylor Graham...
UH Football Deathwatch: Game 1 Predictions
Predicted score: USC 35, UH 6 (two field goals in the 4th quarter)
Predicted significant injury: QB Taylor Graham, out indefinitely (knee, concussion)
Shamus is the name. Today, sports is the game. You’re thinking: Why care? Sure, life is like high school, but do we have to attend pep rallies and worship the quarterback all our lives?
No, of course you don’t. But as long as it’s your money that the clique kids at UH are throwing away to prop up the football program, you might as well toss some goobers from the cheap seats.
The proposition: If UH were to cut football, and put the money and community emphasis into its respectable research science programs, continue exploiting the islands’ incredible biodiversity as a living laboratory, and beef up its Asian Studies department, the U could score some quantifiable successes that would show up in the annual college ratings—which do matter. Yes, UH as an academic upstart. Or as the double 800 SAT high school senior in Nebraska will say to his parents: “Gosh, I know it’s sunny all the time there, but I’ll be in the library or the lab or colleting specimens on French Frigate Shoals.”
More colleges make waves and change their reputations by academic successes than by sports. And it’s cheap relative to football costs. (More to come on this model in a future post, but it’s clear that somebody with a brain in Manoa had this in mind when they hired M.R.C. Greenwood, whose witch-hunt came after only a couple of bad bounces, the worst none of her own doing. By driving Greenwood out with torches and pitchforks, the entire Hawaii community disgraced itself in the eyes of the U.S. education establishment.)
But let’s get back to the game. If UH can muster a defense this year (they gave up a 75-yard TD pass on USC’s first possession last year), if they can run on a USC defense that last year was gappy and prone to giving up, they can hold the score down.
But even with the running game going, UH is not going to score many points. The WaneBows are starting a QB, Taylor Swift—er, Graham—who rode the bench at Ohio State for three years without seeing more than a minute’s time. The only reason he’s here is his father, Kent Graham, was one of those journeymen whose travels around the NFL apparently gave him a little leverage with new Athletic Director, former Buckeye athletic department functionaire Ben Jay, and maybe coach Norm Chow.
Graham is as tall, and as slow, as that statue of the Duke at Waikiki. His type of QB went out with Roman Gabriel. (Although USC also has a QB, Max Wittek, in the old pro mold, his work in relief of Matt Barkley at the end of the last season was basically awful.) With a weak and undersized O-line, Graham’s dead meat and will be sacked five times and may even exit the game with a knee injury. The Trojan defense will feast, as scribes are wont to say. They’re a surly bunch, after being humiliated by Stanford and UCLA last year. On offense, the Trojans will chew up the UH defense if they start their more mobile and managerial QB, Cody Kesseler. The UH defense will hold and then fold.
In seasonal terms, there’s little hope of new blood turning this thing around. After last year’s 3-9 season, UH has had players retire due to injury, quit in disgust, refuse to attend workouts (and be cut) and get into serious legal trouble. So now there are 29 players who’ve never seen college action, (stat credit: Star-Advertiser, who we wish would’ve turned the same gimlet eye on rail, and Kaka’ako--opportunities missed, perhaps, to football).
Bottom line: It says something about UH that last year’s best player was an Australian... In this first game of the season that will be seen as the beginning of the end for its football program, UH’s best player will be the USC coach, Lane Kiffin, a doofus who is on his way out unless he murders opponents like the WaneBows. If he starts Wittek, UH has hope and Kiffin is a dope.
LOCKER ROOM GOSSIP:
*UH Football is going to lose $2 million or more a year henceforth and into the foreseeable future; there will be accounting attempts to hide the sum, but with UH footing the travel costs of opponents from all over the U.S. (average trip cost: $250,000), we’re looking like a desperate jilted lover buying diamonds for a gold-digger.
*The massive and ineluctable conference alignment of the past year—there are now 4 or maybe 5 superconferences that suck up all the TV time and money and bowl consideration—led to the WaneBows being kicked to the back of the line of a jury-rigged conference that’s loster than the Donner Party; we are literally the kid nobody wants to have on their team, except that we give away all our Mars Bars without asking.
*The rise of super-conferences is to leverage televised game money (80% of it ESPN’s, 5% Fox’s), none of which will go to UH; the rich will get richer, the poor poorer. UH isn’t even among the poor, it’s flat broke.
*The advantages UH once enjoyed in recruiting under-appreciated athletes (read: Samoans) have vanished; we only get the players who’ve been passed over by the Mormon schools and the PAC-12. Dreadfully departed former coach, Greg McMackin, imposed by philanderer-in-chief June Jones on our jellyfish regents and boosters, soaked the program in his flopsweat and left it smelling like a school of dead akule.
*Our last and best hope of reversing the situation was last year. Given a winning season and a winning bowl game, and we might have gotten a longshot offer from a better conference or at least better financial terms; but the team was poorly conditioned (see: all those injuries) and its new coaching staff was a pickup team led by a faded legend, Norm Chow, whose ride into the sunset has turned into something darker and grimmer.