In my blog a few weeks ago, I warned University of Hawai'i head football coach June Jones about the old Irving Berlin saying: "The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success."

After the theatrics of the past week, I suspect the truth in Berlin's words had a lot to do with Jones' decision to leave UH for SMU after making history with an undefeated regular season and Hawai'i's first trip to a Bowl Championship Series game that was only slightly tarnished by the 41-10 Sugar Bowl loss to Georgia.

By jilting Hawai'i for SMU, Jones is leaving a team that probably has nowhere to go but down — at least in the near future — to take over a 1-11 program that has nowhere to go but up.

And the Mustangs were willing to pay him $2 million a year to lead them to higher ground, plus other promises of support that UH simply couldn't match without committing more resources to football than the university can reasonably afford given the many pressing needs throughout the system.

The 12-0 regular season nicely bookended Jones' nine-year tenure with a team that was 0-12 the year before he took over.

The 2007 season may have been as good as it ever was going to get for UH football, which faces inherent handicaps from Hawai'i's isolation, lack of first-rate athletic facilities and recruiting disadvantages compared to Mainland colleges.

There's another set of bookends to consider: Jones' career at UH started with a 62-7 loss to USC in his first game and ended with the blowout loss to Georgia in New Orleans.

Despite his perfect regular season, his first outright Western Athletic Conference championship, his high-powered offense and vastly improved defense, the Warriors weren't that much more competitive against a top-BCS squad than the 0-12 team he inherited from Fred vonAppen in 1999.

And the next level could only look further away with Jones losing his All-American quarterback, his three jackrabbit receivers and key hitters on both sides of the ball as UH heads into a new season that opens on the road against last year's national champion Florida.

While expectations would have been heightened in Hawai'i after the dream season, SMU will be happy with a steady turnaround that the undeniably talented Jones should easily be able to deliver with his record-setting offense and knack for recruiting players with NFL potential.

He'll get the facilities and institutional support he always felt were denied him at UH, and he'll have to fill only 30,000 seats in SMU's Gerald J. Ford Stadium instead of the 50,000 at Aloha Stadium.

Judging from all the reports of crying, hugging and praying as this drama played out, Jones is obviously an emotional guy.

But in the end, it was a calculated decision in which he did what he thought was best for himself at a time when his market value is perhaps the highest it'll ever be. Nobody can fault him for that, but neither does it warrant fitting him for a halo as some of his supporters suggest.

The foot-dragging by UH in negotiating a renewal of his contract gave Jones the excuse he needed to leave. Last-minute efforts by the university president to try to meet his demands could have given him an excuse to stay if he wanted one, but clearly his desire was to go while the going was good.

All we can do now is thank him for the excellent job he did, wish him well and move on as quickly as we can.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.