National Game of Disinterest (Week 2)

Now that we have identified the SEC Game of Interest and the National Game of Interest, it is time to identify this week's National Game of Disinterest. This is the game that is interesting solely because it is a football game. It will be watched only by the most die-hard fans of the participating schools, and even they probably won't enjoy it that much. This week that game is: Oregon State at Hawaii.

I like Hawaii, I really do. The islands are beautiful, the Haka is awesome, and "Rainbow Warriors" is a pretty sweet name for a team. But Hawaii is really, really bad at football. Since we exposed them on national television in the 2008 Sugar Bowl, the Rainbow Warriors have gone 33-45, including an abyssmal 4-20 in the last 2 seasons under Norm Chow. The football team is so bad, in fact, that Hawaii athletic director Ben Jay publicly suggested that the university might consider disbanding it. He later back-tracked on those comments, but I think he might've been onto something.

It's hard to imagine the University of Hawaii ever breaking even on football. The travel costs alone are prohibitive -- Hawaii is approximately 2,400 miles from the mainland US. To put that into perspective, Georgia is less than 2,100 miles from California. That means that literally every game of college football played by the Rainbow Warriors involves one team taking a 5-hour-plus flight across at least 2 time zones. That's insane.

And it's not like Hawaii has a deep football tradition. Their most famous football alumni are Timmy Chang and Colt Brennan. They've won precisely one outright conference title (the WAC in 2007). They've won exactly one NCAA-sanctioned bowl game played outside of their home state. Heck, Hawaii wasn't even a state until nearly 100 years after the first college football game was played.

Hawaii doesn't even have the distinction of playing the last football game of the day anymore. This week that honor goes to Texas Tech at UTEP.

Oregon State will probably win if they can overcome the crippling jet lag, but I probably won't even bother checking the score on Sunday morning. Neither should you.

Go Dawgs!