The last time Hawaii and Cal played each other in football was in a season opener. But it had a bowl game vibe. It even had a fancy name \u2014 the Sydney College Football Cup.<\/p>\n
And Nick Rolovich coached in that one, too. It was in Australia in 2016, his first game in charge at his alma mater, UH. Cal won 51-31.<\/p>\n
Now, for the Hawaii Bowl on Wednesday at the Ching Complex, Rolovich is the interim head coach for the Bears against the Warriors.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s just one of several great storylines that make this perhaps the most intriguing Hawaii Bowl, especially for Hawaii fans, since the game\u2019s inception in 2002 \u2014 which was in large part due to Rolovich\u2019s 20 TD passes in the final three regular-season games of 2001, resulting in a 9-3 record, but no bowl game for one of the hottest teams in the country.<\/p>\n
Fast forward nearly 25 years, and in one corner, you\u2019ve got Rolovich, who was the Warriors coach when they last played in this bowl game, in 2019. It was a drop the mic moment \u2014 beating BYU 38-34 completed a 10-5 season, and Rolo left for greener pastures at Washington State.<\/p>\n
Rolovich has the distinction of beating the then-rival Cougars in his last game as a UH coach and player \u2014 eight of those 20 TD passes in the last three games of his career came in a 72-45 senior day thrashing of BYU.<\/p>\n
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His quarterback at Cal is freshman Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, a record-breaking star from Ewa Beach and Campbell High.<\/p>\n
In the home team corner stands another Warriors legend \u2014 head coach Timmy Chang, the only two-time MVP of the Hawaii Bowl. Rolovich and Chang were UH teammates in 2000 and 2001, and later on the same coaching staff at Nevada.<\/p>\n
The Warriors are also led at QB by a star freshman from Hawaii, Micah Alejado, who chose UH after playing high school football at national powerhouse Bishop Gorman in Nevada.<\/p>\n
For both head coaches and starting quarterbacks, the 2025 Hawaii Bowl is proof that you can come home \u2014 in Rolovich\u2019s case, to two homes. Rolovich, who is from the California Bay Area, will remain with the Bears on new head coach Tosh Lupoi\u2019s staff as assistant head coach and QBs coach.<\/p>\n
Warriors fans will rejoice that Alejado said he will remain home after leading them to an 8-4 regular-season record. In this age of instant transfers and NIL money, the Mountain West Freshman of the Year could have received some tempting offers if he\u2019d ventured into the portal.<\/p>\n
College football was very different nearly 20 years ago, but the Hawaii Bowl and another quarterback\u2019s subsequent decision to remain with the Warriors had huge significance.<\/p>\n
The most important game of the UH\u2019s 2007 season wasn\u2019t even played in 2007.<\/p>\n
And, no, we\u2019re n0t talking about the Jan. 1, 2008 Sugar Bowl, where the previously unbeaten Warriors were exposed and dismantled 41-10 by a strong Georgia team led by a freshman quarterback named Matthew Stafford. That game was important in the sense that appearing in it brought a lot of money to UH and the rest of the Western Athletic Conference, but viewed from another perspective, it amplified what many already knew: The Warriors\u2019 2007 regular-season schedule was very weak.<\/p>\n
But a game more than a year before that debacle at the Superdome on New Year\u2019s Day is one of the main reasons UH was ranked high enough to be deemed worthy of the Sugar Bowl after compiling its 12-0 record with several narrow escapes against mediocre (to be nice) teams. Just one win came against a ranked squad, Boise State, the previous season\u2019s Cinderella, with its historic Fiesta Bowl win over Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
On Dec. 24, 2006, the nation took notice of UH football because of what happened in the Hawaii Bowl.<\/p>\n
Arizona State was just a middle of the Pac-10 team. But because the Warriors whupped \u2019em, Hawaii became a hot team to watch, including for the voters of the polls. This became even more of a \u201cthing\u201d on Jan. 17, 2007, when record-setting quarterback Colt Brennan announced he would return for his senior season.<\/p>\n
Brennan had torn up Arizona State in the Hawaii Bowl, and was co-MVP with receiver Jason Rivers in UH\u2019s 41-24 win.<\/p>\n
The return of Brennan and most of the offensive playmakers, including Rivers, was on the voters\u2019 minds when they ranked UH 23rd (AP) and 24th (coaches) in the preseason polls going into 2007. The last thing they had seen UH do on the field was Brennan pass for 559 yards and five touchdowns against a team from a big boy conference.<\/p>\n
Several of UH\u2019s best players, including top linemen on both sides of the ball, would not be back from the \u201906 team. But no one seemed to really think much about that until later.<\/p>\n
It is often said preseason rankings mean nothing. But, at least back then, they did. Even if you were near the bottom of the Top 25 in preseason, it was a lot easier to climb the rankings than if you were not in them at all (assuming you kept winning, of course). The difference between No. 25 and first in \u201cAlso Receiving Votes\u201d was huge, especially for an infrequent flyer in the polls, like UH.<\/p>\n
Although they came close a few times, the Warriors never lost during the \u201907 regular season, and ended it as the nation\u2019s only undefeated team. The polls were a big part of the BCS formula that was then used to determine who got to play in the big bowls, and UH was 10th in the ratings that placed the teams for the BCS games.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s why the 2006 Hawaii Bowl was the most big-picture significant of the 21 that have been played.<\/p>\n
But it had little to do with Arizona State, other than ASU being a brand-name opponent from what was then a power conference.<\/p>\n
Wednesday\u2019s showdown between UH and Cal sets up as quite possibly being the most meaningful of all for Hawaii football fans, because of emotional connections to main characters on both teams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last time Hawaii and Cal played each other in football was in a season opener. But it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[35159,7],"class_list":{"0":"post-619258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-editors","9":"tag-football"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115762354256454303","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}