With each loss the University of Hawai‘i football team has suffered in the 2026 season, the list of possibilities for what the Rainbow Warriors can accomplish coming off a charmed 2025 season has shrunk dramatically.
Make the 12-team College Football Playoff, which ESPN's Bill Connelly boldly predicted back in January? That probably went out the window during the team's season-opening loss to Stanford on Aug. 29. Contend for a Mountain West Conference title? Those hopes were washed away in a 20-16 loss to San Jose State on Oct. 3.
In late October, Hawai‘i is 1-6 following its most painful defeat yet, a 21-10 loss to conference leader New Mexico. The Rainbow Warriors led 10-0 at halftime and were held scoreless for the remainder of the contest. Holding on to a narrow 10-7 lead in the fourth quarter, quarterback Micah Alejado fumbled at the 1-yard line, which eventually led to a pair of late New Mexico touchdowns.
With five games remaining in the regular season, one final goal for the Rainbow Warriors remains cut-and-dried: the 'Bows must win all five games to get to 6-6 and reach bowl eligibility.
"Shoot, there's a lot of urgency," linebacker Wynden Ho‘ohuli said following Tuesday morning's practice. "It's just all in the preparation. It doesn't have to be all in practice — it could [also] be in the film room, to get on the same page and on the side when you're just talking with the boys and stuff like that. Just keeping that urgency in your mind and knowing that we got to be able to make it to this bowl game, and as a senior, we all want to get there."
An all too common four-quarter sequence for the Rainbow Warriors in 2026 has been the team's defense keeping the 'Bows in games while the offense struggles to keep up, then the dam breaks for both units late, as was the case against New Mexico on Saturday.
On one hand, the Rainbow Warriors have been competitive in all seven games thus far. Even in its 30-12 loss to Arizona State on Oct. 10, its biggest losing margin of the year, Hawai‘i had the ball down 17-6 on three consecutive possessions in the third quarter and couldn't capitalize as the Sun Devils pulled away. On the other hand, only four other FBS teams have a lower red zone scoring percentage than UH's conversion rate of 62.50%. As he evaluates how his team moves forward ahead of the team's road contest on Saturday at Northern Illinois, UH head coach Timmy Chang will lean on the former as he continues to stick with the same process.
"I thought things went good," Chang said of Tuesday's practice. "There's a lot of detail in really just pouring into the guys and making them understand that the things we can control, let's control them. Let's be be better prepared. Let's be better detailed. So, bullets were flying.
"We are ready, and that's the message to the coaches as well, is how are we communicating to these guys? How are we making a Tuesday practice like this more detailed, putting pressure on our guys to make sure they know and understand what's going on so we can go execute Saturday? So, the game plan is to go out there, far travel, but go out there and go execute."
Ironically, it was prior to the Hawai‘i matchup that Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham announced he was ceding offensive play-calling duties to offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo. Dillingham cited a desire to have more time to be an actual head coach and the attention that's required on other aspects of the program. When Chang was asked about the notion of deferring play-calling in an effort to focus more on his duties on and off the field on Tuesday, he doubled down on his process in running the UH offense.
"It adds a lot to my plate," Chang said of calling plays. "I've actually dove in deeper into playcalling and taking over the whole offense, and so there are things that I saw early on that were going to be problems, and so I wanted to address them right now and then get a hold of them. But as we are in season and we're going through it, situations do pop up. For me, it's just continuing to find ways to get our staff to coach better and making sure that we're going to go out there and execute."
As the Rainbow Warriors head to DeKalb, Ill. for their first-ever matchup against Northern Illinois, the 9:30 a.m. HST kickoff will be between the two teams at the bottom of the Mountain West standings. Northern Illinois is 0-6 overall and 0-2 in conference play.
While Hawai‘i has tasted victory once in 2026, the amount of losing the Rainbow Warriors have endured is new to some members of the team, most notably quarterback Micah Alejado, who lost just two games as Bishop Gorman's starting quarterback from 2020 to 2023. Even the notion of losing streaks was foreign to Alejado, as the Rainbow Warriors did not lose consecutive games in 2025. But in 2026, the 'Bows began their season with a losing streak and are currently on a run of four straight defeats.
"Obviously the season's tough, right? First time ever being like this," Alejado says of losing. "You're figuring out more stuff about yourself and how you are as a person, especially in a time like this. You find out your character and all that. Especially in this position that we're in, you gotta understand that being a quarterback, everybody still kind of counts on you, so you still gotta ride the boat. It's about waking up every day with a positive attitude and just trying to lead."
On paper, Saturday's contest could appear to be a favorable one for the Rainbow Warriors, but Alejado knows the 'Bows can't defeat anyone if they don't stop defeating themselves.
"I think it's just an 'us' issue, right? Just mental mistakes or taking the wrong step, or making the wrong read for me, or making the wrong throw, or turnovers, or I'm fumbling the ball on the 1. It's just unacceptable mistakes," Alejado said. "Just one issue is humongous. I guess it starts with me, right? Fumbling on the 1-yard line, it's unacceptable. So, I think it's something that has to happen within us, and not just the coaches."
Christian Shimabuku can be reached at christian@alohastatedaily.com.
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