If you're trying to divine the prospects for Greg McMackin's survival as the University of Hawai 'i's head football coach, the most telling hint wasn't anything that happened Saturday night at Aloha Stadium.

For all the calls for change that the debacle that was the latest loss, 54-9 to unbeaten Boise State, provoked, more illuminating was what took place three days earlier on the Warriors' practice field.

That's where UH-Mänoa Chancellor Virginia S. Hinshaw gave a public pep talk to the team and what is widely interpreted as a vote of confidence to its embattled coach.

It was also a pointed reminder that McMackin is her coach and she, more than anyone on campus, holds the key to his future there. The buck — or in this case $3,300,012 of them — stops with her.

It should be remembered that in the turbulent days after the departure of June Jones as head coach and the firing of Herman Frazier as athletic director in January of 2008, that Hinshaw boldly stepped into the vacuum , hiring McMackin, moving bureaucratic mountains in Mänoa to make it happen.

She signed off on his five-year contract worth $1,100,004 per year and she approved his return after the infamous slur episode this summer. Any move to oust McMackin now, short of the Jan. 15, 2013 expiration of his contract, would require her approval, not to mention her willingness to help come up with at least some of the $3.3 million likely necessary to buy him out.

Former UH President David McClain turned over athletics to her and his successor, M.R.C. Greenwood, has so far shown no interest in change.

Athletic director Jim Donovan is McMackin's immediate superior, but anything he might have in mind — and he has said little beyond counseling patience amid the current 2-5 (0-4 Western Athletic Conference) tailspin — has to be run by his boss, Hinshaw.

It would be career suicide for Donovan to do otherwise, since his contract allows UH to buy him out with but one year's salary ($240,000), not a multi-year parachute like McMackin's deal.

Short of McMackin again inserting foot to mouth at tonsil depth or negotiating his own exit, people familiar with McMackin's contract say if things worsened to the point where UH decided it wanted to make a change it would have little choice but to come up with the cash, so well-crafted is the 19-page contract by the coach's attorney, Bert T. Kobayashi Jr.

Or, as a coach at a BCS school was moved to say recently, "that's the guy I've got to get to do my next (deal)."

In the present economic climate, where educational programs are being painfully pared and the athletic department has been running upwards of a $6 million accumulated net deficit built over seven years, spending $3.3 million to buy out a football coach, on top of the investment it would take to hire a replacement, would be a hard sell to the Board of Regents and the community.

More likely is that McMackin, who came aboard in the 11th hour of the 2008 recruiting season and has suffered through an injury-plagued 2009 season, gets at least the 2010 season to demonstrate whether he can turn around the program's sagging fortunes.

When UH bought out then-head coach Fred vonAppen after the 1998 season for $262,650, school officials said things had reached a point where the decision became one of not whether they could afford to buy out the failing regime but whether they could afford not to.

At UH these days, there should be no mistaking that Hinshaw is the one who decides what time it is in the football program.