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Even before the kickoff of Saturday’s football game between the University of Hawaii and UCLA, some Bruins fans watching the nationally televised broadcast wasted no time pointing out the elephant in the room.

It was a very small elephant.

“When was the last time UCLA played at a venue that small?” one commenter .

Other UCLA fans took it upon themselves to answer what might have been meant as a rhetorical question: “I remember a game at Houston maybe 25 years ago that looked like a high school stadium on TV.”

Ouch.

Saturday’s game at the Clarence T.C. Ching Athletics Complex at the University of Hawaii Manoa campus was deemed “officially sold out” by the UH athletic department. However, on the CBS live broadcast of the game, it sure looked like there was a lot of empty silver space on those blazing hot bleachers.

Meanwhile, Bruins fans were gawking at the optics. On , one UCLA supporter anticipated that the game, “should have a bit of a high school (Texas high school) vibe.”

The Los Angeles Times coverage of the game was more charitable than the fan chatter.

“UCLA set to play in smallest venue of the season” was the  by reporter Iliana Limón Romero. “The Rainbow Warriors’ stadium is under renovation, so the Bruins are preparing to play in the smallest venue of their season with a seating capacity of 16,909.”

Um, not quite. Aloha Stadium is . It’s just sitting there, slowly rusting, waiting for a reinvention that continues to become ever more grandiose, well beyond what the island or the island’s largest football team can support. The current price tag for the new development is $400 million from the state in a  that would include housing, hotels, retail, entertainment and commercial ventures within the area.

The current seating capacity of Ching Field is 15,194. The reported crowd on game day was an optimistic 13,470 — not counting the folks who were caught on camera watching the game from the shady comfort of the adjacent parking garage.

Yes, Ching stadium , but it is the right size for Hawaii.

It is the right size for a college football program that has struggled for over a decade, a state that doesn’t have any professional teams, and a place that is a long plane ride for teams from the mainland.

One of the fundamental troubles of modern Hawaii is a kind of body dysmorphia. These islands are much smaller than local leaders think they are. Oversized projects get approved and built and then cannot be sustained by local residents or tourist dollars.

The Ching Complex may look small on TV, but Hawaii is small. The population of these islands — just over 1.4 million — is less than half the population of California’s Orange County. We can’t have what they have. We shouldn’t. Things work better for us at the proper scale. So many of Hawaii’s problems are due to this faulty idea that making things bigger makes things better. Sometimes, Costco size is too much.

Coach Timmy Chang is living the dream of a local kid who did well in his hometown university, went pro, and then came home to lead the football team at his alma mater. It would be sweet for him to have a winning season in his third year on the job. Fingers crossed for you, buddy.

But even if he does have an amazing season followed by several more amazing seasons, even if he takes Hawaii to a glorious winning streak that stretches for years, he’d still have a hard time filling the new Aloha Stadium, which is planned for 25,000 seats. That’s half of what the old stadium could, but rarely did, hold. However, at the Ching complex, students can walk over from the dorms, fans can snuggle on those metal bleachers, and game days can feel loud and exuberant instead of quiet and sadly empty. The most successful long-term use of Aloha Stadium is in the parking lot.

Stay at the Ching. Invest in the Ching. Leave Halawa for low-cost housing with room for vegetable and lei gardens, a community learning center, and maybe small-business incubator. Keep UH football on the UH campus where the UH community can easily fill the student section (or watch surreptitiously from the parking garage.)

Build a local fan base. Build a community. Build some shade. Not every game is going to be a network television event. It’s better to have a team that generates excitement bigger than its stadium than a stadium that will always be overhyped and underutilized.