Hawaii Football Throwbacks: FCS teams

Hawaii pits its 16-game winning streak against FCS opponents against unbeaten Central Arkansas at Aloha Stadium today.

Unlike last year’s Hawaii Football Throwbacks entry on FCS teams, there is actually a past meeting to potentially look at in this series — UH came back to beat UCA 25-20 to open the 2009 season.

But, that being only 10 years ago, we’re focusing on a different game against an FCS foe today.

How about the one that launched the winning streak? After UH lost a stunner, 45-20, to FCS Portland State to open the 2000 campaign, everyone was rightly wary of PSU’s fellow Big Sky member Montana to open 2001 in a rare neighbor island game. The Grizzlies had made the FCS playoffs in 1998 and 1999.

Three days before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Rainbow Warriors and the Grizzlies squared off at War Memorial Stadium in Wailuku. A crowd of 11,254 was on hand in the 15,000-seat stadium to see the Rainbow Warriors defeat the eventual NCAA I-AA champion Grizzlies 30-12.

Timmy Chang went 31-for-54 for 435 yards and running back Thero Mitchell Jr. scored two touchdowns as UH rolled up 525 yards of offense. A 5-foot-6 freshman, Mike Bass, got the start at running back. Interestingly, Bass took 12 direct snaps and finished with 77 rushing yards.

“I had a fun time, and I’ll always remember Maui. You never forget your first college football game,” Bass told Stephen Tsai afterward.

Linebacker Pisa Tinoisamoa led a banged-up defense by racking up 13 tackles (five for loss), sacking Grizzlies quarterback John Edwards three times and forcing a fumble. He’d trimmed his weight from 255 the previous year to 215.

“It was exciting,” Tinoisamoa after getting the crowd energized on a successful fourth-quarter stand in the red zone. “It was great to get that winning feeling back into our system again. We didn’t do much winning last year (3-9).”

Current UH outside linebackers coach Jacob Yoro, a Mililani native, was a Montana junior linebacker in the game. He had to rehab a knee injury in time to make the trip back home.

“Coming back home really got me pumped to do my rehab,” Yoro said then.

Get this: Montana, which entered the game 1-0 with a win at Cal Poly and ranked No. 2 in the FCS, would not lose again that season. Joe Glenn’s Grizzlies won their next 14 games, capped with a 13-6 win over Furman for the FCS (then I-AA) NCAA championship. They’d win their first 10 games the following year for a 24-game streak before falling in the last two games.

UH went on to go 9-3 in June Jones’ third season, capped with the resounding 72-45 win over No. 9 BYU.