Four games. Two on the road and two and home. The 2-6 University of Hawai‘i football team will have to win every single one of them to keep its 2026 bowl hopes alive.
Following their best showing of the year, a 56-21 rout at Northern Illinois on Oct. 24, the Rainbow Warriors were idle last weekend, their final bye week of the regular season. From here on out, the 'Bows are hoping to make the next month a November to remember, starting with Saturday at UTEP. The game will be nationally televised on FS1, and kickoff is set for 4:30 p.m. HST.
"The intent's got to be there for us, and we want to play good for the last four games of the season," Hawai‘i head coach Timmy Chang said. "But for us, it's one day at a time, one play at a time, and it's going to be a good challenge because we have to go away and El Paso continues to get better. You just look at the team and they're playing solid defense."
After sputtering to a 1-6 start, the Rainbow Warriors had the fortune of facing a winless Northern Illinois team, despite having to travel 4,255 miles to get their first conference win of the year.
In UTEP, the 'Bows will take on a Miners squad that is 1-7 overall and 0-4 in Mountain West play, its only victory on Sept. 12 over Texas Southern. But Hawai‘i still can't afford to take any team lightly, considering how its season would take a turn for the worse if it can't get past UTEP.
"We have to be tough," Chang said. "There's teams that are playing really good football that we're going to have to face, and at this point in the season, it's really about your team and how they're mentally driven, how they they stay together, how they continue to fight, continue to get better, continue to want to execute, want to do it for the guy next to them, and so those are the things that are going to pop out when you see a team week in and week out, and we really want to be that team."
Though the Rainbow Warriors were given a respite from the Mountain West schedule last week, they didn't come out of it mentally refreshed, particularly members of the team's coaching staff, who are still grieving the loss of former head coach June Jones.
"I think whether it's me or coach Chris [Brown] or leaders in the community that talk about coach, everyone just remembers him being a man that brought us together," Chang said. "There's a lot of alumni here over his tenure, guys that he just touched, and we're able now to reconnect with those guys and do something special. We had so much great times here as as players and we all thank him for bringing us here together."
Back when Chang was Hawai‘i's record-setting quarterback under Jones, the team would play UTEP each year as annual Western Athletic Conference foes. The two programs have not played a conference game since 2004, but the series will be revived on Saturday with the Miners joining the Mountain West as full-time members over the summer. Hawai‘i is 18-13 in all-time matchups against UTEP, but the Miners took the most recent matchup 51-20 in 2004, Chang's junior season.
"There were a lot of big battles. We faced a lot of good teams from El Paso, and so just having them in the conference is something that I Iove, and it'd be a great challenge for us as we play out the series again and just have good competition with them," Chang said. "Whether it was here in Hawai‘i or there in El Paso, the one thing that you're going to remember — they were tough games, they were hard-hitting games, they were physical games, and we really battled it out to the end."
Christian Shimabuku can be reached at christian@alohastatedaily.com.
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