If Nick Rolovich has come to twitch at that early-week knock on the door or the summons to the head coach's office, well, who could blame him?

"Nick, got a moment?" usually means, "boy, have we got a job for you."

Since setting foot on the University of Hawai'i campus nine years ago, the Warriors have asked Rolovich to do a lot of things, few of them easy.

In 2000, months out of JC and his head still swimming from the introduction to the June Jones playbook, they handed him the starting quarterback job and a team to run in a major rebuilding year.

A season later with its popular franchise quarterback, Tim Chang, sidelined with a wrist injury, UH sent Rolovich on the road to lead the Warriors. They asked him to go touchdown for touchdown against Ben Roethlisberger and David Carr.

So giving Rolovich, the now 30-year-old quarterbacks coach, the duty of calling offensive plays in the Warriors' game against Washington State Saturday in Seattle, was thoroughly in keeping with what has become his Manoa upbringing.

It was a battlefield commission he said he didn't seek and one he hardly saw coming with offensive coordinator Ron Lee's move to concentrate on coaching the receivers.

But Rolovich knows the score — and the depth of the challenge he faces. Particularly this week. We all do. Preseason is over for UH. The offense needs to put up points and the Warriors need to win some games to get on pace with their avowed goal of a bowl appearance. Nine-point first halves will no longer cut it.

In many ways, the offense starts with him and the buck now stops with him, too. Yesterday, when a reporter asked if he welcomed the chance to call the plays, Rolovich said a resolute, "I do. I have to."

You have to like that about Rolovich. He doesn't flinch under pressure. He embraces challenges. Always has. It showed time and again in his playing career, one that ended with perhaps the most remarkable flourish in school history, 1,548 yards and 20 touchdowns in a three-game stretch to close the 2001 season.

But he's calling the plays, no longer running them, and the hope is that the experience in the offense and time spent at Jones' side will pay dividends.

Calling plays in this offense is something Rolovich said he saw early on as his future, eventually. "I planned on doing it at some point in my career," Rolovich said. "So, why not now? I've just got to be ready."

Not for the first time in his UH career are the Warriors counting on him to be just that.