HONOLULU – Timmy Chang inherited more than a passing offense from June Jones. He inherited the belief that a quarterback from Hawai’i could carry the islands onto college football’s biggest stage. On Thursday, the player who became the Rainbow Warriors’ head coach mourned the mentor who had kept guiding him long after his playing career ended.
Jones, who transformed Hawai’i football with his run-and-shoot offense and led the program to its only Sugar Bowl appearance, died October 29 in Oregon, the University of Hawai’i announced. He was 73. The university’s tribute did not disclose a cause of death.
His nine seasons as head coach produced a school-record 76 victories, two conference titles and a moment in 2007 when a program far from the sport’s traditional power centers finished an entire regular season unbeaten. The record matters. So does the fact that one of the quarterbacks who helped build it now runs the team.
Chang called Jones “a father figure, a mentor, and a visionary” in the university’s memorial tribute. He said Jones believed in a young player from Hawai’i and gave him the chance to run his offense, then continued making time for him as he entered coaching and took over the Rainbow Warriors in 2022.
Jones supplied it. Hawai’i went 9-4 in his first season, shared the Western Athletic Conference championship and won the O’ahu Bowl. The university described that reversal as the largest single-season turnaround in NCAA football history at the time. In one year, a winless team had become a bowl winner.
The passing game gave that recovery an identity. Jones had learned the run-and-shoot under Mouse Davis, an early advocate of making the pass the center of an offense rather than a supplement to the running game. At Hawai’i, that commitment became the setting for quarterbacks whose production forced national attention toward Honolulu.
Chang left college as the NCAA’s career passing leader. Colt Brennan followed with his own succession of school and national records, becoming Hawai’i’s first and only Heisman Trophy finalist in 2007. They were different players linked by a coach willing to place the offense, and the program’s ambitions, in their hands.
Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, a former Hawai’i player and coach, recalled the comeback against Washington that completed the regular season. In the university’s tribute, he remembered the team falling 21 points behind and still finding a way back. The Sugar Bowl, he said, had gone beyond what people thought possible.
Jones finished 76-41 at Hawai’i, taking the team to six bowls and winning four. His career continued elsewhere, but he, Brennan and the 2007 team all entered the university’s Circle of Honor. Hawai’i Athletics said the current staff’s inclusion of former Rainbow Warriors reflected his belief in the state’s players and their potential.
His next college rebuilding job came at SMU after a contract dispute ended his Hawai’i tenure. According to CBS Sports’ Shehan Jeyarajah, Jones inherited a Mustangs team coming off a 1-11 season and delivered its first winning season in 12 years by his second year. He helped restore consistency to a program still defined by the long consequences of its 1987 NCAA death penalty.
CBS credited him with a 112-84 college head-coaching record, national coach-of-the-year recognition in 1999 and conference coach-of-the-year honors three times. Yet the statement from his Run and Shoot Certification company emphasized the opportunities he gave people rather than the statistics his teams accumulated.
The university said details of memorial services and ways to honor Jones would be announced in the coming days. Chang’s own tribute made a different commitment immediate: he would spend the rest of his career trying to honor the coach who had believed in him. The offense Jones left behind still has one of his quarterbacks on the sideline.
