University Of Hawaii

Colt Brennan, he's been everywhere, man: Laguna Beach, born there, 1983. Santa Ana. Played quarterback at Mater Dei High, once serving as backup to Matt Leinart. Worcester Academy, Massachusetts. One year of finishing school, although Brennan was far from done. Colorado. Walked on, spent a redshirt year, got into trouble after walking drunk into a woman's dorm room, pleaded guilty to trespassing and burglary charges, spent seven days in jail, and was dismissed from the football team.

Perhaps the most important game in this season's BCS horn of plenty will be played Saturday night, with the vast majority of college football fans already warm and cuddly and tucked in. If you are in the East, you might catch the ending by setting your alarm for 3 a.m. This is the essence of the University of Hawaii's problem. It has a very good football team -- unbeaten as a matter of fact. But few know about it and even fewer care. Some schools have special-teams problems.

June Jones took over a college football show called "Hawaii 0-12." It was 1999, and it was horrible. Jones inherited the nation's longest losing streak and then, in his first game as head coach, lost a 62-7 squeaker to USC. The program wasn't run on a shoestring budget -- it was more an aglet (plastic tip of the shoestring). Less than a decade later, Hawaii has gone from sugar fields to the Sugar Bowl. No one could have seen this coming. "To be quite honest, I did envision this," Jones said.

As tropical vacations go, Colt Brennan is having one heck of a college football career. The Southern California kid is hanging around Honolulu these days, trying to get to the beach as often as possible and, in between, playing some quarterback for the University of Hawaii. That means running Coach June Jones' warp-speed offense, flinging passes as casually as Frisbees on the sand. It also means grabbing attention for himself at the western fringe of the game.

This is a story about Jerry Glanville, so it's bound to be a little odd. You expect to read about a football coach but end up on the streets of Baghdad. Or in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. You get Elvis, a flipped-over suitcase and something called the "Black Rose." You get a fireplug of a man with a grin that's too wide and cheery for this hour of day, the hazy side of 9 a.m., which is when the University of Hawaii football team practices. "Nice, huh?" he says.

When Hawaii plays top-ranked USC here today, Colt Brennan is expected to split time at quarterback for the Warriors. For Brennan, the game marks a reunion with former high school teammate and USC quarterback Matt Leinart. It also represents the start of a major college career delayed by a criminal conviction. In early 2004, as a reserve quarterback at Colorado, Brennan was arrested for drunkenly entering a female student's room and allegedly exposing himself and fondling her.

If Timmy Chang passes for 15,000 yards playing half his games on an island in the middle of the Pacific, will anyone pay attention? Forget East Coast bias. We're talking mainland bias. Kickoff for many of Hawaii's home games is around midnight in the East, so no one at the ESPN studios in Bristol, Conn., is scrambling to get the highlights on the air when Chang slings the ball for 400 yards for Coach June Jones, one of the last practitioners of the run-and-shoot offense.

USC defensive coordinator Bill Young said Sunday he will interview for the Hawaii coaching job, a position he also was a candidate for several years ago. Young said he expects to meet with Hawaii officials in Southern California, probably this week, instead of traveling to Honolulu. The school is also expected to interview June Jones, the San Diego Chargers' interim coach, on the same trip. Utah Coach Ron McBride already has interviewed at Hawaii, and Young is among about six candidates.

Going from the NFL to a college team hardly follows the logical coaching progression. Then again, June Jones isn't like other coaches. Jones was promoted two months ago by the San Diego Chargers as interim head coach job to turn around the poor-performing team. On Thursday, he was named head coach of the Hawaii Rainbows, one of the worst teams in Division I-A. "Unless you've lived in Hawaii, unless you know the people there, it's different than anything else.

Tim Carey will play football at Hawaii this fall without a scholarship, a penalty handed down by university officials, his father, Tim Carey Sr., said Friday. Carey, a quarterback from Los Alamitos High, was among a group arrested in a gambling raid in Honolulu in May. Carey pleaded no contest to the charges and paid a $200 fine. School officials decided to revoke Carey's scholarship, meaning he will have to pay the approximate $8,000 to attend school this year.