The University of Hawai’i terminated the contract of its head football coach today. Norm Chow had a stellar career in the college ranks when he was hired by the University:

Chow was introduced as UH’s 22nd head coach and brought with him a resume that included being on the coaching staff of three national championship teams; having coached three Heisman Trophy winning quarterbacks and six NFL first round draft picks. He also brought with him the pro-set offense, which he perfected at stops at BYU, North Carolina State, USC, UCLA, Utah, and at the NFL’s Tennessee Titans.

He took over a team which had gone 6-7 the year before but had been to two bowl games in the preceding four years. His teams were 10-36 in his four seasons with the Rainbow Warriors including a 2-7 record this year after Saturday’s loss to Air Force.

I don’t think anyone including Chow understands why he was unable to coach players here to at least mediocrity. I don’t think anyone but the wild-eyed optimists thought he’d bring UH to national prominence, but most of us thought he’d get UH back into contention for conference titles and trips to the Hawai’i Bowl at least every other year. That’s why the dismay has been so great as his teams went 3-9, 1-11, and 4-9 before this year’s calamity. Both games prior to Saturday’s 58-7 shellacking by Air Force were within minutes of being won when the team’s defense collapsed amidst a sea of stupid penalties and missed tackles. Had they won those two games the won-loss record this week would have been 4-5 and I suspect Chow would have kept his job pending the results in the final four games of the season.

It’s very hard to recruit football players from the Mainland US to play for the U of Hawai’i, particularly if they have no family connections here. Trying to persuade a three-star or better recruit that he should come play for a team that’s 2,500 miles from the West Coast in the (second-tier FBS) Mountain West conference is difficult enough. Trying to persuade him to play for a team that’s in the midst of a five-season losing streak is even harder. That losing streak has also caused average attendance at the football games he’s going to play in to drop to the mid-20 thousands — yesterday it was 15,000, the lowest since 1976.

Recruiting home-grown players is not much easier. The really good ones have offers from the Pac-12, Mountain West and WAC schools and even further east, and because of the high cost of living here those kids may have aunties and uncles who live in cities where those schools are located. Those connections mean a lot to local kids and their parents.

What you end up with as a Hawai’i football coach is willing but undersized players with a sprinkling of Mainlanders. Oh, and there’s only room for 3,719 students in dorms and 1,200 more in on-campus apartments; there’s no dedicated football dormitory and rental units off-campus are very expensive.

There are no professional sports teams in the state. UH is all we’ve got, which is why even non-alumni take its travails so seriously.

It’s a conundrum.