Monday Night Madness: Kamehameha makes it two comebacks in two weeks

Jeff Carrico gave me the number before the game, and he gave it to me to two decimal places.

"I need nineteen from Dak," the Kamehameha owner told me Monday afternoon, on the record. "Eighteen point seven three if you want to be exact, and tonight I do. Watching from home, same shirt as Sunday."

Dak Prescott scored 23.28 in Dallas's 38-21 win at Philadelphia. Kamehameha beat All Strong 113.08 to 107.02. That is a second straight win for a team that began the season 0-5, and it is now 2-5.

I'll be straight about the arithmetic, because I would rather be accurate than tidy. Jeff's 18.73 was the gap on the scoreboard Monday afternoon. The final numbers moved a little on both sides after scoring corrections, which happens, and none of it changed who won. Prescott cleared the number with room to spare. Whether the shirt deserves a share of the credit, I leave to Jeff.

Monday-night wins are the ones owners remember longest, I think, because they have to sit through every snap of them with nothing left to set. Jeff did his work on Sunday. On Monday he could only watch.

Now the part I have to say carefully. When Kamehameha won its first game last week, by less than two points, I wrote that a 1-5 team had found a floor, not a turnaround. I still don't believe two wins make a turnaround. The Remote standings are plain about it: the Sports Ballers are 6-1, It's Miller Time 4-3, the IR Kings 3-4, Kamehameha 2-5. But a floor is something you stand on. Two wins in a row, the second one closed by a quarterback on a Monday night, is a team climbing off it. Slowly, from a long way down. I'm allowed to change my mind when the record changes, and this week it did.

The part of Monday's conversation I keep coming back to, though, isn't Prescott. It's Jacob Rodriguez.

Rodriguez joined Kamehameha in the early hours of a Saturday before Week 6, a linebacker added to a roster whose more visible trouble was at running back. He sat out Week 6 on his bye. Week 7 was his first start in a Kamehameha lineup, and it was a quiet one.

On Sunday night Jeff told me Rodriguez "is going to play for us every week." On Monday I asked him what he made of the first start. He didn't flinch.

"Two and a half isn't the line he wants and it's not the line I want," he said. "He was out there every snap I asked for, and one quiet week doesn't change what I said. He plays."

I take the owner at his word on the promise. What I can't tell you is the role. I don't have the snap count from Sunday, and I don't know how he fits beside Nick Bolton and Jack Campbell in that linebacker room. One game is a score, not a job description, and I'm not going to turn one quiet line into a verdict in either direction.

Compare that with what Jeff said about his kicker. Chad Ryland, who kicked six field goals in the first win, spent Sunday on the bench while McPherson started.

"Chad put up ten on my bench and Evan put up five starting. I know. I saw it," Jeff said. "I set that spot on who I trust over a season, not one Sunday, but when the bench keeps beating the lineup that's not luck anymore, that's a signal, and I'll look at it Tuesday with everything else that sat."

Here is my reading, and it is only mine. Listen to the two answers side by side. About the linebacker, Jeff repeated a promise. About the kicker, he described a pattern and named a day to look at it. In my experience, an owner who reaches for the word "signal" is already partway to a decision. If something changes in the Kamehameha lineup before Sunday, I would look at the kicker before I looked at the linebacker. Jeff hasn't said that. I'm saying it.

Sunday brings the IR Kings to Kamehameha, a division game. The IR Kings are 3-4. A Kamehameha win would pull the two clubs level at 3-5, which is not a sentence I expected to type two weeks ago, when this team had nothing on the board but losses.

Jeff ended Monday's note the way he ends most of them: "Ask me again Tuesday and I'll give you the full Week 7."

Tuesday is a few hours away. He can change the shirt now.