Honolulu Weekly

Ten years ago, when a gallon of gas cost $1.50 on this island and the twin towers still rose up from the New York City skyline, the University of Hawai‘i could not win a football game. The Warriors went 0-12.

Things have changed.

Last season, the ‘Bows were undefeated in the regular season and earned a berth to the Sugar Bowl, the first ever Bowl Championship Series appearance in the history of the program. The team rallied to win three road games in which they trailed in the fourth quarter, and Warrior quarterback Colt Brennan broke or tied 18 National Collegiate Athletic Association, 17 Western Athletic Conference and 41 school records on his way to becoming a Heisman Trophy finalist.

The post-season meltdown that followed saw a 41-10 trouncing by BCS powerhouse Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, stalled contract negotiations that drove beloved coach June Jones to Southern Methodist University, the termination of former athletic director Herman Frazier and Brennan’s ascension to the pros.

New faces

“It has been a roller coaster ride,” said new athletic director Jim Donovan. “In December, I don’t think there was anybody in this state that didn’t have a smile on their face with us going to the Sugar Bowl, and then by January 5 or 10, everybody was moping around. But it’s ended up positive.”

Donovan played football for UH in the early ’80s, earned two degrees from the school, and has worked there most of his professional life. He left his post as executive director of the Sheraton Hawai’i Bowl in March to return the campus where he first started as a graduate assistant coach more than 25 years ago.

“I liken the athletic program to the front porch to a house,” he said. “It’s something [that] can invite people in, and if it’s really well kept and if it’s a nice place, you can have parties and barbeques.”

The comparison is fitting coming from a guy who’s easy to imagine manning the grill at a cook-out with smile on his affable face and a beer in his hand.

“We’re not the most important thing to the university by a long stretch, but we are the vehicle of visibility in so many ways,” he said. “Up there, you know, they’re curing cancer and they’re doing things with engineering, astrophysics and volcanology.”

Along with Donovan, one of the university’s most important new hires is Greg McMackin, who, like Donovan, isn’t actually new to the school. McMackin took the top coaching spot in January after a stint as defensive coordinator for the team in 1999 and a return to Hawai’i in that capacity last season. In addition to having maybe the coolest last name ever (at least since Superbad hero McLovin), he looks a little doughy, sounds a little Southern and knows Hawai’i football.

The last major turnaround for the Warriors happened under McMackin’s watch. He helped coach the team from a winless 1998 to a 9-4 showing in 1999, the single biggest turnaround in NCAA history, and improved the ‘Bows defense from 109th to 35th in the nation. The team won the WAC championship both years he coached it.

And after a summer of uncertainty, the last major gap in the upcoming season has been filled by quarterback Brent Rausch, a sophomore who’s on target to start for the Warriors, at least in their season opener at No. 5 Florida on August 30.

After a tumultuous winter, Hawai’i football finally seems to have regained its balance.

But a positive outlook on the gridiron ignores that ever-present aspect of college ball that doesn’t go so well with beer and boiled peanuts: Academics.

Hitting the books?

Like them or not, academics are intrinsically linked to college sports. And the latest indication that no one can get away with being too cool for school may be the training camp absence of Tyler Graunke, who seemed the heir apparent for starting quarterback after years of waiting in the wings. Last February, Graunke was suspended from participating in team conditioning and other activities so that he could resolve academic issues, though spokesmen for the Warriors won’t comment on the specifics of his absence this time around.

One thing has become clear, if the team doesn’t buckle down and bring its academic performance up, the NCAA will slap the program with enough sanctions to seriously hurt recruiting. It’s part of an aggressive academic reform initiative that will go on to prohibit post-season bowl games for teams that repeatedly fail to meet baseline academic requirements. The NCAA will even consider removing Division I status for the worst of serial non-compliers.

An NCAA report released last spring shows that in the past four years, the Warriors graduated just about 45 percent of its football players. Hawai’i is one of 17 Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I) football programs–out of 119–that incurred scholarship restrictions as a result of academic shortcomings. Typically, programs get to hand out 85 scholarships, but Hawai’i is limited to only 84 for the season (could be worse, though: the University of Alabama at Birmingham only gets 76). But here are some rather staggering facts: Academically, the school now ranks somewhere between the 30th and 40th percentile. That means that by NCAA standards, more than half of FBS football programs out there are outperforming UH in the classroom.

APR

The NCAA introduced the Academic Progress Rate, or APR, as a point-based ranking system to monitor academic performance, and spur improvement at schools with low retention and graduation rates. A school’s APR is calculated each academic year based on the eligibility, retention and graduation of each scholarship student-athlete. Each scholarship player earns a maximum of two points per semester, one for being academically eligible and one for remaining at the same school. The APR is tallied by dividing the team’s total points by the highest possible total, then multiplied by 1,000 to remove the decimal point. The NCAA identifies an APR of 925 as the baseline performance level, which translates to a graduation success rate of about 60 percent.

“Any team receiving APR penalties this year needs to improve academically and bring its APR above the 925 benchmark,” said NCAA spokeswoman Jennifer Kearns in an e-mail. “Penalties only get worse if a team consistently falls below 925, but the goal is improvement, not punishment.”

One of the driving factors behind the NCAA’s academic reform movement is the necessity for student-athletes to be prepared to go pro in something other than football.

“Hardly any NCAA student-athletes earn a paycheck as a professional athlete,” said Kearns. “Just 1.8 percent of NCAA football student-athletes go on to play professionally. But graduating with a degree is important even for those who go pro, because they won’t compete as a professional athlete the rest of their working lives.”

Junior defenseman Antwan Mahaley says he gets it, and his academic advisors describe him as a team leader for that reason.

“You always do your work first, that’s what my parents taught me,” Mahaley said. “Take care of business because you never know, football may not always be there for you.”

So far, the NCAA’s plan seems to be working. Since data collection began four years ago, the overall APR for all programs has jumped 11 points to 934. But UH still lingers below the average, and below the minimum standard, with a four-year average APR of 921.

“The APR has changed how schools recruit students, approach academics and manage academic programs,” Kearns said. “More coaches, athletic directors, university presidents and chancellors are realizing the importance of maintaining a good APR and are relaying that importance to their student-athletes.”

Limitations of a Small-Budget Program

Ask anyone involved in the football program at UH, and they’ll attest to what Kearns claims. Coaches and tutors say the team showed outstanding, even record-setting academic improvement last year, but say they haven’t yet compiled the numbers. The NCAA says only a school can release data for individual years.

And while those numbers are apparently still getting crunched, McMackin says the ratings themselves are misleading, since Hawai’i doesn’t have the resources that other schools do.

“The thing is, the APR is here to stay,” he said. “We don’t have the money that the BCS schools have to solve their problems. You know, hire class checkers and that type of thing. They have the same problems that we do but they can cover it up. They throw money at it. One school spent $150,000 toward just class checking, which we can’t do. Arizona has 54 class checkers. We don’t have that kind of money, so we’ve got to be more creative.”

There has been some outcry from those at smaller-budget programs who argue that academic reform just hurts the little guys. Only a handful of teams in the six major conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10 and Southeastern) have been sanctioned. But even some of the big names have underperformed egregiously. When both Texas and Georgia were ranked in the nation’s top 10 in 2006, a time when the national graduation average for FBS football programs was 66 percent, graduation rates for both the Longhorns and Bulldogs hovered around 40 percent. Both schools now have APRs in the 960s.

Intuitively, it jibes that a team that is great on the field might struggle in the classroom or vice versa. But schools like Boston College, a program with an APR of 972 that consistently graduates more than 90 percent of its players and closed out 2007 with an 11-3 record, proves this isn’t so. And interestingly, one preseason press ranking for WAC teams closely reflects the nine teams’ APR standings. Top-rated Boise State (953) happens to have the best APR in the conference, while No. 6 San Jose State’s 865 APR is the lowest.

New Regime…New Results?

To its credit, Hawai’i has worked hard to keep up. It wasn’t until 1999 that administrators began taking a serious second look at the structure of its academic support system, and opted to move its oversight out of the athletic department and over to the academic side.

“Not that there was a complete lack of accountability before, but we feel like we are a special faculty and this way just brings a different sensibility,” said Jennifer Matsuda, chair of Hawai’i’s Student-Athlete Academic Services Department. “Now there’s no question of priorities. We totally support our student athletes on the field, but our first goal is to get them graduated.”

McMackin says that’s his first priority, too.

“Our number one goal is to graduate 100 percent of the players,” he said. “Everybody has to work together and we all have to support one another and know that we’re serious from top to bottom. Education is number one. It’s that important.”

While badmouthing June Jones is like sacrilege in these parts, academic advisors and players alike seem energized by McMackin’s comparatively tough stance.

“I think that the players are realizing now that Coach Mack is very serious when he tells them that they need to get their degrees and they need to be responsible for the decisions that they make,” said Matsuda.

Senior defensive lineman Keala Watson, a local guy who McMackin calls a “gentle giant” off the field and a “tough mother” on it, said his coach’s commitment to academics was immediately apparent.

“He wasn’t even officially the coach yet, and he was pushing us guys to get into summer school,” Watson said. “In years before, only like 20 guys would go to summer school. This year, it was something like 80.”

And part of the push to get his players in school meant finding a way to fund it since scholarships only cover semesters in the regular school year–no easy feat for a program that didn’t even have enough soap in the locker room for its players two years ago. McMackin said arranging for all of his scholarship players to have a chance to go to summer school was one of his first orders of business as head coach.

“You ask, ‘What are we going to do about the APR?’ You give them more education. You get more tutors. You give them more school,” he said. “I know we’re above a 3.0 (GPA) as a football team from over the summer and I am really proud of that because in some places guys just take advantage of it and jerk around, but these guys, for them to go to school and be humble about it, you know we’ve got great guys.”

Academic advisor for the defensive line Trina Kudlacek said the move gave incoming players a leg up.

“Coach Mack’s push for summer school included bringing in our new players before they ever even started here,” she said. “So the freshmen got a head start, they get familiar with the campus, and they completed six credits. So if you think about it, over the course of four years, that’s 24 credits. That’s an entire academic year.”

And with that kind of progress, the goal isn’t just to raise the team’s APR or graduate 100 percent of its players, but to have them graduate early.

“We now have a goal with our players that they graduate the December of their senior year,” said Kudlacek. “In the spring, we know that this happens historically, they want to go off and take their shot in the NFL. So we want to make sure they’ve graduated first. It’s fairly ambitious, but we have the commitment of a dedicated coaching staff.”

Now, with 10 days until kickoff, and the freefall that led to the program’s rebirth last winter feeling more like a decade ago, University of Hawai’i football finds itself at a crossroads, which sounds like as much a sports cliche as taking things “one game at a time,” or a team’s best defense being a strong offense. And it is. How about this one: You have to look back in order to look forward. Cliche or not, it’s true. Looking back, McMackin has already proved he has what it takes to turn things around for a team athletically. What remains to be seen is what he can do for the Warriors’ academic standing. But athletic director Jim Donovan, who says his GPA was 3.1 when he was on the team, is confident in the new head coach.

“All I can say is Coach McMackin is an educator first,” Donovan said. “I’ve seen some coaches who’ve come in with the philosophy of ‘win at all cost.’ They really don’t care if a kid comes in and stays eligible for a couple of years, then goes and does whatever, plays for the NFL or just gets an hourly paying job. They do not care as long as that player can help them win. But with Coach Mack, if a kid isn’t getting his academics done, he isn’t going to play. It doesn’t matter if you’re a starter or if you’re third string, if you don’t get the job done in school, then you’re gonna have to sit it out.”

“Back Coach Mack” has become the unofficial slogan of the season, and that support is palpable–largely from those who believe McMackin is backing them.

“Coach is very serious about enforcing academic rules,” Matsuda said. “He is so supportive of what we do. It’s been a hopeful time for us.”

But as any passionate athlete or sports fan knows, hoping for success is much different than actually achieving it.

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2008 Academic Progress Report Scores for WAC Schools

Boise State 953

Fresno State 946

Nevada 934

Utah State 926

Hawai’i 921*

Louisiana Tech 921

New Mexico State 909*

Idaho 904*

San Jose State 865*

* indicates WAC teams that lost scholarships.