By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

The cat is out of the bag. The jig is up and University of Hawai'i football coach June Jones might as well come clean now.

It seems that people — a few suspicious Brigham Young University fans, mostly — are on to him. Not for a minute are they buying this stuff about quarterback Tim Chang having a broken pinkie on his right (throwing) hand that could keep him out of the Aug. 31st opener against Eastern Illinois.

Never mind that the doctors say a "non-displaced fracture of the proximal phalanx" is involved. Yeah, right, stuff your "Gray's Anatomy" these disbelieving Cougar fans are saying, they know a set up when they smell one.

Or, as one BYU fan put it on the CougarBlue Web site Friday: "The one and only thing that is happening here is June Jones doesn't want BYU to see any film of the QB. He's holding him (Chang) out so he can try and surprise the Cougars."

"Who does June Jones think he's fooling?" wrote another e-mailer.

Here it is three weeks before the UH-BYU game and some people, it seems, have let all those Enron and Arthur Anderson Inc. stories run away with their imaginations.

The next thing you know they'll claim Elvis was sighted running pass patterns for Chang at Graceland or that Chang was seen climbing aboard a flying saucer at Roswell, N.M.

You know the college football season is practically upon us when the conspiracy theories start getting as thick as some of the preseason magazines. And as outrageous as some of the predictions.

But if you are the Warriors, there is more than a good belly laugh to be gained from all this foolishness. There is a measure of roundabout respect to be assumed as well.

For many years, even when the Warriors won back-to-back games over BYU and ruined the Heisman Trophy coronation of Ty Detmer, they were stung by the perceived lack of public respect for their achievements.

After what had been a 10-game mastery of UH, the losses, when they came, were pretty much shrugged off by BYU faithful as even-a-blind squirrel-can-find-an-acorn type of events.

No matter how often BYU lost to UH or by how much, neither the Cougars nor their fans would grant the Warriors the slightest satisfaction in the triumph. Of course, behind the scenes the Cougar coaching staff had attempted to lure away a UH graduate assistant so they could dissect and disable the spread offense.

For the most part, the public posture of BYU fans and coaches alike was, "What, us worry?" UH, they maintained, was just another game on the schedule and not one they gave much thought to until it arrived.

But when the Warriors ended BYU's bid for an undefeated season eight months ago in a 72-45 nationally televised rout, it wasn't the kind of thing to be easily dismissed or quickly forgotten. The way they did it, running a track meet past the Cougars' lumbering linebackers and putting up the kind of numbers that BYU has been legendary for, made it something that couldn't be shrugged off.

Especially among the Cougar Nation. With a rematch scheduled for Sept. 6 at Provo, Utah, suddenly UH has some folks' attention. Almost to the point of paranoia. Now, it matters who the quarterback in black is and what he's doing as the game approaches.

Wait until they find out Jones has the real Tim Chang throwing deep routes to aliens at Area 51.