SAN ANTONIO – UTSA opened their fall training camp Wednesday harping on a new mentality and new way of doing things after two disappointing seasons in a row.
The Roadrunners went 7-6 in both 2025 and 2024, snapping a bowl win in each season. But head coach Jeff Traylor, entering his seventh season with the program, is shaking things up in hopes of getting the team back to what made them great earlier in the decade.
With a coaching staff makeover and new practice schedules to adapt to, Traylor called this upcoming season his most stressful one to date.
“I’m excited for the new, but cautious of the unknown,” Traylor said. “This is the world that I believe is best or we wouldn’t be going down it.”
Traylor said the team lost touch of its identity over the last two years. He said part of the problem was veteran players getting snagged in the transfer portal, leaving younger players without a role model to learn the way from.
He added that the lack of knowledge wasn’t their fault. They just hadn’t been there long enough to learn.
“We’re trying to do a better job of making sure our team is more understanding a deeper knowledge of what our culture really is about ... which I might have taken that for granted the last couple years, to be honest,” Traylor said.
One of the biggest changes headed by Traylor is at offensive coordinator. Rick Bowie takes the job coming from Western Kentucky as their offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
Quarterback Owen McCown said he has gelled well with Bowie, who played quarterback himself, and said Bowie is instilling confidence in him.
“He’s a younger guy, so he relates to us really well,” McCown said. “His offense is a ton of fun to be a part of, he believes in the system, and we’re super excited to have him.”
According to McCown and Traylor, a thing that really sticks out about Bowie is his conviction.
They said he believes in his system — stays true to his system — and brings a lot of clarity to the offense.
“I’m a guy that can be negotiated with on a lot of things, and I will move certain ways,” Traylor said, comparing himself to Bowie. “Rick is, like, getting him to move anything, it’s literally me putting the gavel down and saying, ‘Rick, you’re doing this.’ Now, when you tell Rick to do that, Rick says, ‘yes sir’ and does it as good as anybody in the building. But that’s also why I hired him. I like how stubborn that mull is.”
“At the end of the day, to know what you took in your notes or what your read is, to go to sleep at night knowing that’s your reads is super helpful for us,” McCown said.
But having his players only hear from him about recapturing the pillars of UTSA football wasn’t enough for Traylor. So, he brought in an outside voice to speak with the team this offseason — a motivational speaker and author, Todd Gongwer.
For McCown and linebacker Owen Pewee, the big takeaway from Gongwer’s speech was learning how to hold teammates accountable without exploiting them to the entire team.
For Traylor, he said bringing in Gongwer was more about reminding himself of the struggles the last two seasons while honing in on a refreshed mindset for the future.
“I’m not ignorant to the chatter. I know there are people doubting, second guessing,” Traylor said. “Y’know, they’re used to winning championships around here, and it’s good, they should be.”
“We’re trying to get every single person on our team to have a real identity who they are as a human,” he added. “Not what the world tells them they are. Not what their agent tells them. But the people that love them the most.”
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