HADLEY, Mass. — They don’t play in the same conference. Heck, one of the teams isn’t in a league at all.
HADLEY, Mass. — They don’t play in the same conference. Heck, one of the teams isn’t in a league at all.
The schools are 5,000 miles apart. So it’s not like they recruit from the same areas or compete with each other for fans and/or corporate sponsors.
They never even played each other before last year.
But don’t let any of that fool you. The college football game Saturday between Hawaii and Massachusetts can best be described as a polite grudge match — at least from the UMass perspective.
The Minutemen will only hint vaguely at antipathy, if that even. They’re actually saying all the right things.
“They have a great team,” said Adam Breneman, the UMass preseason third-team All-America tight end.
The Minutemen, though, possess plenty of reason to have not just a chip, but a boulder on their collective shoulder.
Come kickoff Saturday, they will have had nine months to the day to think about the what-ifs of that last drive that ended with a pass by their quarterback falling to the turf in the Aloha Stadium end zone instead of into a UMass receiver’s hands for a game-winning touchdown.
Every college football team is motivated at the start of a new season. But the Minutemen are especially so. They have a rare opportunity in that they’re starting their schedule against a team they lost to in heartbreaking fashion, ending the previous season.
UH beats UMass
UMass had the ball at the Hawaii 21 on fourth-and-11, but quarterback Andrew Ford’s pass for wide receiver Bernard Davis was incomplete, largely due to close coverage by freshman cornerback Rojesterman Farris II. Hawaii was then able to run out the clock for a 46-40 win.
Farris had been beaten for long passes earlier in the game, but he came up with a breakup when it was needed most.
“We don’t make that play, we don’t go to a bowl game,” UH defensive backs coach Abe Elimimian said.
It also gave the fledgling cornerback and the entire defensive unit a dose of confidence.
“That last play was the culmination of a lot of good things,” Elimimian said. “It started with the call, a good call by (since-departed defensive coordinator) Kevin Lempa. And the guys up front did their job. One guy can make a play, but it takes 10 other guys to do their job to put him in position to make that play. (Ford) got flustered, pressured by the guys up front and rolled out of the pocket.”
For UMass, it was a missed opportunity to avoid losing 10 games and instead finish on a high note.
“It left a sour taste,” Breneman said. “But it made us realize we have to work that much harder because Hawaii is a good team. We’re just very excited to get after it with them Saturday.”
There’s another motivating factor that no one talks about much, but it’s unmistakably there to some degree. After the end of the 2011 season, offensive coordinator Nick Rolovich was not retained on the Hawaii staff when Norm Chow replaced Greg McMackin as head coach.
Rolo’s stint at UMass
Rolovich applied for offensive coordinator at UMass and got the job, only to leave it when he was hired for the same position, but with a more stable program, at Nevada.
It makes this a homecoming game for a guy who never even unpacked his suitcase.
That kind of thing happens more than most people realize. It is human nature and part of the coaching profession — you’ve got to pursue the new best opportunity available, even if it means leaving the old best opportunity available.
But if you’re the Minutemen, of course that might not sit right with you. Even if you were a high school junior when it went down, it’s still a source of incentive to beat a team whose head coach is a guy who came and left your program without even coaching a down.
Fired up
Coaches and athletes will take motivation wherever they can find it. But for the Minutemen players, losing a game that was theirs to win fires them up more than losing a coach who never coached them.
“It’s crazy how time flew by. It seems like just yesterday we were in Hawaii,” said UMass senior linebacker Stave Casali, who posted 105 tackles last year. “Losing like that definitely gave us motivation. They were one of the more physical teams we played.”
But UH was sloppy in that win, flagged for 12 penalties for 101 yards that helped the Minutemen stay in the game.
“We had lots of chances to put them away but never did it,” Rolovich said.
These two programs might never play each other again.
But, thanks to the way last season ended and how this one begins, Hawaii and Massachusetts have plenty of reasons to compete with the intensity of longtime rivals.