The “Golden Screwdriver” may be mythical, but the Hawaii-Fresno State football rivalry is still very real.

At least for a couple more years.

The Rainbow Warriors and Bulldogs meet at 1 p.m. Hawaii time Saturday in Fresno, Calif., with UH seeking to build on last week’s 34-13 home win over Nevada and keep its fleeting bowl game hopes alive.

UH (3-5, 1-2 Mountain West) was to walk the infamous “Red Mile” of taunts and band fanfare into 41,000-seat Valley Children’s Stadium, where the Rainbow Warriors have won two of the last four meetings.

“You walk through fans, you’re walking outside of the stadium and down their hill. You’re getting ready for battle in their beautiful stadium,” UH coach Timmy Chang said this week. “It’s a fun place to play. I’ve always enjoyed playing there and coaching there. It’s a great environment for football.”

In 2016, then-UH coach Nick Rolovich called for a “Golden Screwdriver Trophy” to be contested between the teams in honor of an alleged 2002 incident at Fresno in which coach June Jones claimed a screwdriver was among several items thrown at the UH sideline. The accusation elicited an apology from FSU.

Whether the screwdriver incident happened has long been a subject of debate and remains something of a punchline. Several years back, a Fresno radio station even did its own mock screwdriver trophy.

FSU (5-3, 3-1 MWC) and interim coach Tim Skipper can essentially clinch bowl qualification with a win Saturday. Skipper was elevated in July after longtime coach Jeff Tedford announced he would step down.

If the 2023 UH football schedule felt somehow amiss, that could be because it was the first time in 32 seasons that UH’s longest-running opponent did not appear on it. It was due to a change in the Mountain West’s schedule format to do away with divisions, and UH and FSU were not locked into each other’s schedules.

Now it appears that, after the 2025 season, UH and FSU will have to take matters into their own hands to keep the series going.

UH has four perpetual trophy series, all of which figure to be regularly contested in the future with those four opponents — Air Force (Kuter Trophy), Wyoming (Paniolo Trophy), UNLV (Ninth Island Showdown) and San Jose State (Tomey Legacy Trophy) — having signed a Memorandum of Understanding along with UH to remain Mountain West members through 2032.

But Fresno State was among the first MWC teams to answer the siren call of the gutted Pac-12 in hopes of greater prestige and a better future payday through a to-be-determined media rights deal. The 2025 season is set to be FSU’s last in the Mountain West.

FSU owns a 30-24-1 all-time record in the series. Saturday’s 56^th meeting is the most of any UH opponent. The Bulldogs have been the better team throughout the programs’ Mountain West tenure, having taken eight of 11 meetings.

Such was not always the case. Chang went 2-1 against Fresno as UH’s starting quarterback in the early 2000s. Chang, who threw for a then-career-high 462 yards in a 31-21 UH win in the 2002 "screwdriver game," demurred on Tuesday when asked whether the series should have a trophy.

“Tough games, tough battles. Always a tough place to play,” Chang said. “But we’re always up for the challenge. It’s a game that we don’t play for a trophy, but it has a lot of meaning and it’s a conference game. They’ve always been good. It’s a historically good program that we love to go to battle with, and they’re playing really well.”

Saturday could be a low-scoring affair; UH and FSU have the top two defenses by yardage allowed (348.3 FSU, 352.6 UH) in the MWC.

A hard-hat, harder-hitting ethos has always been attached to Fresno. The late Colt Brennan had his own run-in against Pat Hill’s Bulldogs with Marcus Riley’s infamous high hit on the UH quarterback in 2007, a 37-30 Warriors win.

Linebacker Jamih Otis said this UH team prides itself just as much on physicality.

“When teams are physical, you’re coming into our world,” Otis said.

The UH-FSU rivalry means something to UH senior quarterback Brayden Schager, the reigning MWC Offensive Player of the Week who scored a career-best four rushing touchdowns against the Wolf Pack. It tied a program record for rushing TDs by a UH quarterback and was the most scores by a UH player since Alex Green in 2010.

Schager’s first start was on Oct. 2, 2021, against No. 18 Fresno State. The freshman, taking over for an injured Chevan Cordeiro, tossed two touchdowns in the fourth quarter for UH’s first notable win at the Clarence T.C. Ching Athletics Complex (played in front of no fans due to COVID-19 restrictions).

“It’s crazy to look back at that. It feels like a long time ago now,” said Schager, who is in the top four in UH career passing yards at 8,446. “But that was a very cool memory for me. … It’ll be fun to play against them again and hopefully get another win. That was an awesome experience.”

It remains UH’s last win over a ranked opponent.

Former UH defensive back Cam Lockridge, a FSU senior, is the reigning Mountain West Defensive Player of the Week for his two interceptions in a 33-10 win over San Jose State.

Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.