POINT AND COUNTERPOINT: Is coaching football at Hawaii a bad job?

Sunday, Hawaii football parted ways with head coach Norm Chow, making Hawaii the jaw-dropping 10th head coaching position to open before November.

Normally, a head coaching opening is a chance to float the names for high-achieving coaches at smaller schools or hotshot assistants at bigger programs. Already, a few names have been floated, like Wisconsin DC Dave Aranda and Oregon State DC Kalani Sitake, and former HC June Jones wants to come back. But things might be different at Hawaii, which has been branded as a Bad Job for lots of reasons, from financial to geographic to political.

But how bad a job is it to coach football at Hawaii? Let’s take a closer look at the facts and figures.

Marcus Mariota was not the norm.

247 Sports has rated 14 Hawaiians in the 2016 recruiting class, including two-stars. The state of California, which includes most of Hawaii’s Mountain West division opponents, has more than three times as many blue chips as Hawaii has total rated recruits.

Granted, Hawaii’s number is better than some states’, and some of those players are really good (Canton Kaumatule, a class of 2015 DE who committed to Oregon, was a five-star). But that isn’t a huge pool to pick from. Plus, the elite prospects tend to go to Pac-12 programs, and schools like BYU recruit the islands as well.

Hawaii’s geography compounds the problem. Hawaii is a five-hour flight from L.A., making it expensive to bring in kids for visits. It also becomes expensive for coaches to fly to the mainland for recruiting visits, forcing the staff to be exceptionally picky about which prospects to evaluate in person.

In addition to road trips to Boise and New Mexico in conference play, Hawaii also had to travel to Ohio State (over 4,400 miles) and Wisconsin (over 4,000 miles) for paycheck games. Next season, they fly over 5,000 miles to UMass. Distancewise, this would be like Cal playing games in Peru and Quebec.

The enormous amount of travel means a major logistical and financial burden and robs preparation time while forcing players to acclimate to multiple time zone changes.

Perhaps the biggest reason many outsiders call Hawaii a bad job is finances. After all, former Hawaii AD Ben Jay said just last year that budget shortfalls could cause UH football to “go away,” and there isn’t reason to think the situation has suddenly gotten better.

The Rainbow Warriors don’t have access to a major TV deal like the Big Ten or SEC, supplementing with a modest pay-per-view deal (they can’t get any TV bonus money from the Mountain West). In addition to huge travel costs, they subsidize travel for MWC teams that visit Hawaii.

Couple that with declining interest at home, due to several years of poor on-the-field results, and the lack of a wealthy donor base, and you have a difficult situation. Even if the existence of Hawaii football is secure for the short term, it is unlikely the school would be able to break the bank for a new coach’s salary.

The Rainbow Warriors play in an older stadium and might need to be rebuilt sooner rather than later, and the program lacks the higher-end amenities that entice recruits.

Since joining FBS in 1971, Hawaii has finished in the AP Top 25 only twice, most recently in 2007. There have been occasional double-digit-wins seasons, and Jones was able to string multiple decent years in the mid-2000s, but the challenges have made it hard to build on any momentum. Even if a young coach beats expectations early, continuing that in the face of institutional challenges will be a tall order.

Idaho, New Mexico State and Eastern Michigan have comparable issues, and maybe there are a few other Group of Five positions that can boast similar difficulties, but there aren’t many.

Even for a good coach, there aren’t many places where it will be harder to come in and win a bunch of football games than Hawaii in 2016.

Photos via Brian Floyd, Flickr, NASA and Timothy Burke.