It's everyone's favorite sports journalism website, The Athletic, back at it with an extensive profile of Jeff Traylor. Like most stories in The Athletic, it's long, but it's a thorough picture of the man.
One thing I didn't know about Traylor is Matt Rhule tried to hire him at Baylor. And Rhule's endorsement helped Traylor get the UTSA job. That speaks volumes. I already was to begin with, but I'm ALLL in on Jeff Traylor. His connections to Texas high school football is off the charts. My only concern would be staffing, but if that can be solidified, this guy could be our Moses to take us to the Promised Land, or at least a 9-3 kind of program.
By Sam Khan Jr. 3h ago
9
SAN ANTONIO — For a football coach, Jeff Traylor spends a lot of time talking about cheese.
Akin to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s “rat poison,” it’s a motivational tactic. Traylor, UTSA’s second-year coach, constantly tells his players, “don’t eat the cheese,” which basically means to avoid outside hype. Last year, he left rat traps in their locker room after a win. Last month, after the Roadrunners upset Memphis on Sept. 25, he offered to drink a gallon of queso to prove the wreckage it can cause if overly consumed.
His team has heeded his warnings. The Roadrunners, who are in their only 11th year of existence, are off to a 6-0 start, the best in school history. Behind Traylor, its rising star coach, a staff stocked with former Texas high school coaches and a program built heavily on player input, the Roadrunners have become one of the feel-good stories of the 2021 season.
During a recent outing on the university’s central plaza, where Traylor handed out hundreds of free Whataburger breakfast taquitos to UTSA students to drum up interest for a home game, Traylor stayed on message.
When one student requested cheese with his taquito, Traylor quipped: “Y’all need to quit eating all that cheese.”
When two more students asked for it, Traylor exclaimed, “All these cheese eaters!”
Another student posed for a photo with Traylor, and before it was snapped, told the coach that he wanted it as a memento for the day that the Roadrunners win a national championship.
“Oh Lord,” Traylor said with a hearty laugh. “He’s eating the cheese.”
. . .
Each year at the Texas High School Coaches Association convention, every FBS head coach in the state sits on stage for a question-and-answer session in front of the state’s high school coaches.
The event draws upwards of 13,000 coaches a year and a significant chunk of them attend the 12-coach panel on the first night. In July, for the first time, Traylor took that stage.
He spent plenty of earlier years in the crowd. A former high school coach, who won three state championships at Gilmer High in East Texas, Traylor cut his teeth across the state, first at Big Sandy High, then at Jacksonville High before taking over at Gilmer in 2001. He had exposure to spread offensive concepts as early as his days in Jacksonville, where brothers Randy, Luke and Josh McCown all prepped.
But Gilmer is where Traylor made his name. The Buckeyes went 175-26 in 15 years under Traylor. The school’s stadium is now named after him.
As he spoke to the high school coaches in July, Traylor quipped: “You guys have way better jobs than us sitting here, I promise you. If it wasn’t for my ego and the money, I’d be right back in Gilmer on that lake again.”
Former Texas coach Charlie Strong was the one who pulled Traylor into college football. He had other opportunities over the years, but wanted to best position himself to be a college head coach. Being a full-time assistant with the Longhorns made sense, as he would make his name as a recruiter, leaning on the Texas high school coaches.
“He wanted to recruit East Texas, and he thought I’d be really good at it,” Traylor said of Strong. “Charlie treated me so amazing. Everywhere we went, he took me with him. I’ll always be grateful for how he treated me. “He never treated me like a high school coach.”
After Traylor’s second season in Austin, Strong was fired, so Traylor looked elsewhere. Matt Rhule tried to hire Traylor at Baylor, but instead he joined the SMU staff with Chad Morris, another Texas high school coach turned college head coach. Morris brought Traylor with him to Arkansas, but that experiment ended after Morris was fired in 2019, 10 games into his second season. Morris is back on the Texas prep scene at powerhouse Allen High.
When the UTSA job opened after the 2019 season, the school hired a search firm, Collegiate Sports Associates. It’s the same search firm that SMU used when Morris left. Traylor interviewed for the SMU job, which went to Sonny Dykes. Traylor said a contact from the firm presented his name to UTSA president Taylor Eighmy and athletic director Lisa Campos.
Traylor was busy preparing for an interview for a vacancy at an FCS program, Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, when UTSA called. Traylor interviewed with UTSA on Dec. 7, Lamar on Dec. 8 and was announced as the Roadrunners’ hire on Dec. 9
.
Traylor credited several colleagues for their assistance and endorsements, from Rhule, now head coach of the Carolina Panthers, to Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek and Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades.
“I had a lot of help,” Traylor said. “You don’t get these jobs without it.”
He has tried to pay it forward. Seven of his staff members, including full-time and support staff, are former Texas high school coaches. At the THSCA convention, which was in San Antonio this summer, he was well received. He held a social at Pinkerton’s Barbecue, expecting roughly 100 high school coaches to show up. More than 500 did. “We drank all the sweet tea,” Traylor said then. “There’s no more barbecue left.”
He has also leaned on the home city for talent. UTSA’s current roster has 29 players from the Greater San Antonio area, including seven from Converse Judson, a traditional Texas high school power. Traylor’s team mantra is the “210 Triangle of Toughness,” which includes the city’s area code.
It’s a two-way relationship. Traylor needs the best players he can get, and the high school coaches want their players to get recruited. And some of them want to follow in his footsteps.
“Boys, the more I win, the more of you they’re gonna hire,” he told the crowd in July. “We gotta go win ball games.”
At 6 p.m. every Sunday night, after practice, players on UTSA’s leadership council meet and have dinner with Traylor at the team headquarters. The group discusses the week’s schedule and one of the five culture pillars that will be the theme for the week. Then they get to the important stuff: game day threads.
The players, not Traylor or any staff member, pick what uniform combination the team will wear in its next game, as well as the attire the team will sport when it heads to the stadium. Last week, players sported warmups on the way to Western Kentucky and blue helmets with white jerseys and white pants for the game. On the flight to Bowling Green, Ky., players wore T-shirts that read, “Don’t eat the cheese” on the back.
It may seem like a small matter, but it’s a level of ownership in the program that the players appreciate.
“Coach Traylor does a great job of allowing us to have a say,” safety Rashad Wisdom said. “I’m glad he lets us be us.”
From the moment Traylor took over the program in December 2019, he tried to instill a player-led culture. In his initial 1-on-1 meetings with players, he asked each of them to tell him three things they liked about UTSA and three things they didn’t. Traylor wrote it all down. Something players agreed upon was that they liked the team’s strength coach, Ryan Filo, who started at the school in 2016 with previous coach Frank Wilson. So Traylor retained Filo.
During spring football this year, Traylor proposed that players who wear single digit jersey numbers be voted upon by coaches and teammates. He liked the idea but was uncertain, with many upperclassmen returning, how it would be received. “I don’t want to split up my team on one of my ideas,” he said.
The players obliged, and team leaders such as Wisdom and running back Sincere McCormick gave up their numbers for spring drills in order to earn them back through the example they set on and off the field. Wisdom, who wears zero, wore 39 in spring, while McCormick, who wears No. 3, wore 23.
“You gotta earn everything that you get,” said senior quarterback Frank Harris, who wears zero on offense. “If you’re in a single digit, it’s basically like having ‘C’ on your jersey as a captain would.”
The player buy-in has contributed to impressive results. In Traylor’s two seasons in charge, the Roadrunners are 13-5. The team has consistently won close games, going 8-3 in contests decided by eight points or fewer.
Last season, the team went 7-5 and played in just its second bowl game. It did so despite a rash of injuries that led to playing four quarterbacks. McCormick, who was the nation’s second-leading rusher last year with 1,467 yards, was the heart of the offense.
This season, the team welcomed back 12 super seniors, plus Harris, McCormick and Wisdom. The result is one of the best Group of 5 teams in the country, which scored a road win over the Big Ten’s Illinois in Week 1 and a 21-point comeback win at Memphis last month.
“I listened to ‘em,” Traylor said of his initial player meetings. “I think that’s when we started to make progress, because they knew I was going to empower them.”
. . .
The Roadrunners launched in 2011 under Larry Coker, the former Miami coach who won a national championship with the Hurricanes in 2001. UTSA spent one season as an FCS independent before moving to the FBS level in 2012, going 8-4 while playing in the Western Athletic Conference. In 2013, the Roadrunners moved to Conference USA, where they’ve remained. Under Coker, the program went 26-32 overall and 22-26 in FBS play but didn’t make a bowl despite two winning seasons because of NCAA eligibility rules at the time for programs moving up.
After UTSA and Coker parted ways following the 2015 season, Wilson, a former LSU assistant, took the reins, getting the program to its first bowl in 2016 and consecutive six-win seasons in his first two years. But after seven combined wins in 2018 and 2019, Wilson was dismissed, and the school turned to Traylor.
The team was reminded recently that, despite its historic 2021 success, it’s still a relative newbie on the college football scene. During an interview last month with an out-of-state radio station, Traylor said the hosts, twice, called the school “USTA.”
For fun, Traylor had his sports information director make a copy of the audio to play before team meetings that week. The sound accompanied PowerPoint slides with McCormick’s face photoshopped on the body of a tennis player. “We called ourselves the ‘United States Tennis Association,’” Traylor joked. Although he said he doesn’t believe things like that matter on game days, they serve as fuel for a good practice, which trickles down to Saturdays.
“We’re still not there yet,” Harris said. “People are still trying to figure out who we are, what we stand for, we’ve got people calling us different names all the time. We still have to go out there and earn everybody’s respect.”
Their on-field play is garnering acclaim. The Roadrunners are receiving votes in both the Associated Press Top 25 and the coaches poll. The wins against Illinois and Memphis raised some eyebrows.
While UTSA is still climbing into the national college football consciousness, it’s also trying to make strides in its own backyard. In August, the school opened the Roadrunner Athletics Center for Excellence, known on campus as the RACE building: a $40 million facility that houses most of the school’s athletic programs, including football. The weight room and locker room are on par with what good Power 5 programs have.
Attendance for home games includes good student support, but is low overall, with modest improvement of late. That’s why Traylor is pounding the pavement both on and off campus. In 2011, UTSA set a record for a first-year program, averaging 35,521 fans for home games. Traylor would love for it to return to that level, but the Roadrunners’ last home game drew just 20,154. Their first two home games hovered around 16,000.
So whenever somebody asks Traylor to make an appearance, the answer is “yes.” “I haven’t said ‘no’ yet,” he said. When he handed out the taquitos recently, he told each student, “see you Saturday at 5,” signaling that weekend’s kickoff time.
“We can’t control that crowd,” Traylor said. “What we can control is how we practice, how we play. If we practice correctly, we play correctly, the winning will take care of itself, and the crowd will take care of itself.”
For the first time in its history, UTSA is a legitimate championship contender. It is the only team in Conference USA that has an unblemished overall record, and the Roadrunners should be favored in most of their remaining games. Rice is up this weekend. The toughest test remaining comes on Nov. 20, when defending C-USA champion UAB visits the Alamodome.
A conference title game appearance would be an impressive milestone for this upstart program that has already achieved a few this season.
“We gotta make sure that we keep getting better ourselves and not get too caught up in what’s going on,” Wisdom said. “I told the guys at the beginning of the season: ‘Everyone can be happy at the beginning of the season, but we want to be happy at the end.’”
They can get there, as long as they lay off the cheese.
One thing I didn't know about Traylor is Matt Rhule tried to hire him at Baylor. And Rhule's endorsement helped Traylor get the UTSA job. That speaks volumes. I already was to begin with, but I'm ALLL in on Jeff Traylor. His connections to Texas high school football is off the charts. My only concern would be staffing, but if that can be solidified, this guy could be our Moses to take us to the Promised Land, or at least a 9-3 kind of program.
By Sam Khan Jr. 3h ago
SAN ANTONIO — For a football coach, Jeff Traylor spends a lot of time talking about cheese.
Akin to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s “rat poison,” it’s a motivational tactic. Traylor, UTSA’s second-year coach, constantly tells his players, “don’t eat the cheese,” which basically means to avoid outside hype. Last year, he left rat traps in their locker room after a win. Last month, after the Roadrunners upset Memphis on Sept. 25, he offered to drink a gallon of queso to prove the wreckage it can cause if overly consumed.
His team has heeded his warnings. The Roadrunners, who are in their only 11th year of existence, are off to a 6-0 start, the best in school history. Behind Traylor, its rising star coach, a staff stocked with former Texas high school coaches and a program built heavily on player input, the Roadrunners have become one of the feel-good stories of the 2021 season.
During a recent outing on the university’s central plaza, where Traylor handed out hundreds of free Whataburger breakfast taquitos to UTSA students to drum up interest for a home game, Traylor stayed on message.
When one student requested cheese with his taquito, Traylor quipped: “Y’all need to quit eating all that cheese.”
When two more students asked for it, Traylor exclaimed, “All these cheese eaters!”
Another student posed for a photo with Traylor, and before it was snapped, told the coach that he wanted it as a memento for the day that the Roadrunners win a national championship.
“Oh Lord,” Traylor said with a hearty laugh. “He’s eating the cheese.”
. . .
Each year at the Texas High School Coaches Association convention, every FBS head coach in the state sits on stage for a question-and-answer session in front of the state’s high school coaches.
The event draws upwards of 13,000 coaches a year and a significant chunk of them attend the 12-coach panel on the first night. In July, for the first time, Traylor took that stage.
He spent plenty of earlier years in the crowd. A former high school coach, who won three state championships at Gilmer High in East Texas, Traylor cut his teeth across the state, first at Big Sandy High, then at Jacksonville High before taking over at Gilmer in 2001. He had exposure to spread offensive concepts as early as his days in Jacksonville, where brothers Randy, Luke and Josh McCown all prepped.
But Gilmer is where Traylor made his name. The Buckeyes went 175-26 in 15 years under Traylor. The school’s stadium is now named after him.
As he spoke to the high school coaches in July, Traylor quipped: “You guys have way better jobs than us sitting here, I promise you. If it wasn’t for my ego and the money, I’d be right back in Gilmer on that lake again.”
Former Texas coach Charlie Strong was the one who pulled Traylor into college football. He had other opportunities over the years, but wanted to best position himself to be a college head coach. Being a full-time assistant with the Longhorns made sense, as he would make his name as a recruiter, leaning on the Texas high school coaches.
“He wanted to recruit East Texas, and he thought I’d be really good at it,” Traylor said of Strong. “Charlie treated me so amazing. Everywhere we went, he took me with him. I’ll always be grateful for how he treated me. “He never treated me like a high school coach.”
After Traylor’s second season in Austin, Strong was fired, so Traylor looked elsewhere. Matt Rhule tried to hire Traylor at Baylor, but instead he joined the SMU staff with Chad Morris, another Texas high school coach turned college head coach. Morris brought Traylor with him to Arkansas, but that experiment ended after Morris was fired in 2019, 10 games into his second season. Morris is back on the Texas prep scene at powerhouse Allen High.
When the UTSA job opened after the 2019 season, the school hired a search firm, Collegiate Sports Associates. It’s the same search firm that SMU used when Morris left. Traylor interviewed for the SMU job, which went to Sonny Dykes. Traylor said a contact from the firm presented his name to UTSA president Taylor Eighmy and athletic director Lisa Campos.
Traylor was busy preparing for an interview for a vacancy at an FCS program, Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, when UTSA called. Traylor interviewed with UTSA on Dec. 7, Lamar on Dec. 8 and was announced as the Roadrunners’ hire on Dec. 9
.
Traylor credited several colleagues for their assistance and endorsements, from Rhule, now head coach of the Carolina Panthers, to Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek and Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades.
“I had a lot of help,” Traylor said. “You don’t get these jobs without it.”
He has tried to pay it forward. Seven of his staff members, including full-time and support staff, are former Texas high school coaches. At the THSCA convention, which was in San Antonio this summer, he was well received. He held a social at Pinkerton’s Barbecue, expecting roughly 100 high school coaches to show up. More than 500 did. “We drank all the sweet tea,” Traylor said then. “There’s no more barbecue left.”
He has also leaned on the home city for talent. UTSA’s current roster has 29 players from the Greater San Antonio area, including seven from Converse Judson, a traditional Texas high school power. Traylor’s team mantra is the “210 Triangle of Toughness,” which includes the city’s area code.
It’s a two-way relationship. Traylor needs the best players he can get, and the high school coaches want their players to get recruited. And some of them want to follow in his footsteps.
“Boys, the more I win, the more of you they’re gonna hire,” he told the crowd in July. “We gotta go win ball games.”
At 6 p.m. every Sunday night, after practice, players on UTSA’s leadership council meet and have dinner with Traylor at the team headquarters. The group discusses the week’s schedule and one of the five culture pillars that will be the theme for the week. Then they get to the important stuff: game day threads.
The players, not Traylor or any staff member, pick what uniform combination the team will wear in its next game, as well as the attire the team will sport when it heads to the stadium. Last week, players sported warmups on the way to Western Kentucky and blue helmets with white jerseys and white pants for the game. On the flight to Bowling Green, Ky., players wore T-shirts that read, “Don’t eat the cheese” on the back.
It may seem like a small matter, but it’s a level of ownership in the program that the players appreciate.
“Coach Traylor does a great job of allowing us to have a say,” safety Rashad Wisdom said. “I’m glad he lets us be us.”
From the moment Traylor took over the program in December 2019, he tried to instill a player-led culture. In his initial 1-on-1 meetings with players, he asked each of them to tell him three things they liked about UTSA and three things they didn’t. Traylor wrote it all down. Something players agreed upon was that they liked the team’s strength coach, Ryan Filo, who started at the school in 2016 with previous coach Frank Wilson. So Traylor retained Filo.
During spring football this year, Traylor proposed that players who wear single digit jersey numbers be voted upon by coaches and teammates. He liked the idea but was uncertain, with many upperclassmen returning, how it would be received. “I don’t want to split up my team on one of my ideas,” he said.
The players obliged, and team leaders such as Wisdom and running back Sincere McCormick gave up their numbers for spring drills in order to earn them back through the example they set on and off the field. Wisdom, who wears zero, wore 39 in spring, while McCormick, who wears No. 3, wore 23.
“You gotta earn everything that you get,” said senior quarterback Frank Harris, who wears zero on offense. “If you’re in a single digit, it’s basically like having ‘C’ on your jersey as a captain would.”
The player buy-in has contributed to impressive results. In Traylor’s two seasons in charge, the Roadrunners are 13-5. The team has consistently won close games, going 8-3 in contests decided by eight points or fewer.
Last season, the team went 7-5 and played in just its second bowl game. It did so despite a rash of injuries that led to playing four quarterbacks. McCormick, who was the nation’s second-leading rusher last year with 1,467 yards, was the heart of the offense.
This season, the team welcomed back 12 super seniors, plus Harris, McCormick and Wisdom. The result is one of the best Group of 5 teams in the country, which scored a road win over the Big Ten’s Illinois in Week 1 and a 21-point comeback win at Memphis last month.
“I listened to ‘em,” Traylor said of his initial player meetings. “I think that’s when we started to make progress, because they knew I was going to empower them.”
. . .
The Roadrunners launched in 2011 under Larry Coker, the former Miami coach who won a national championship with the Hurricanes in 2001. UTSA spent one season as an FCS independent before moving to the FBS level in 2012, going 8-4 while playing in the Western Athletic Conference. In 2013, the Roadrunners moved to Conference USA, where they’ve remained. Under Coker, the program went 26-32 overall and 22-26 in FBS play but didn’t make a bowl despite two winning seasons because of NCAA eligibility rules at the time for programs moving up.
After UTSA and Coker parted ways following the 2015 season, Wilson, a former LSU assistant, took the reins, getting the program to its first bowl in 2016 and consecutive six-win seasons in his first two years. But after seven combined wins in 2018 and 2019, Wilson was dismissed, and the school turned to Traylor.
The team was reminded recently that, despite its historic 2021 success, it’s still a relative newbie on the college football scene. During an interview last month with an out-of-state radio station, Traylor said the hosts, twice, called the school “USTA.”
For fun, Traylor had his sports information director make a copy of the audio to play before team meetings that week. The sound accompanied PowerPoint slides with McCormick’s face photoshopped on the body of a tennis player. “We called ourselves the ‘United States Tennis Association,’” Traylor joked. Although he said he doesn’t believe things like that matter on game days, they serve as fuel for a good practice, which trickles down to Saturdays.
“We’re still not there yet,” Harris said. “People are still trying to figure out who we are, what we stand for, we’ve got people calling us different names all the time. We still have to go out there and earn everybody’s respect.”
Their on-field play is garnering acclaim. The Roadrunners are receiving votes in both the Associated Press Top 25 and the coaches poll. The wins against Illinois and Memphis raised some eyebrows.
While UTSA is still climbing into the national college football consciousness, it’s also trying to make strides in its own backyard. In August, the school opened the Roadrunner Athletics Center for Excellence, known on campus as the RACE building: a $40 million facility that houses most of the school’s athletic programs, including football. The weight room and locker room are on par with what good Power 5 programs have.
Attendance for home games includes good student support, but is low overall, with modest improvement of late. That’s why Traylor is pounding the pavement both on and off campus. In 2011, UTSA set a record for a first-year program, averaging 35,521 fans for home games. Traylor would love for it to return to that level, but the Roadrunners’ last home game drew just 20,154. Their first two home games hovered around 16,000.
So whenever somebody asks Traylor to make an appearance, the answer is “yes.” “I haven’t said ‘no’ yet,” he said. When he handed out the taquitos recently, he told each student, “see you Saturday at 5,” signaling that weekend’s kickoff time.
“We can’t control that crowd,” Traylor said. “What we can control is how we practice, how we play. If we practice correctly, we play correctly, the winning will take care of itself, and the crowd will take care of itself.”
For the first time in its history, UTSA is a legitimate championship contender. It is the only team in Conference USA that has an unblemished overall record, and the Roadrunners should be favored in most of their remaining games. Rice is up this weekend. The toughest test remaining comes on Nov. 20, when defending C-USA champion UAB visits the Alamodome.
A conference title game appearance would be an impressive milestone for this upstart program that has already achieved a few this season.
“We gotta make sure that we keep getting better ourselves and not get too caught up in what’s going on,” Wisdom said. “I told the guys at the beginning of the season: ‘Everyone can be happy at the beginning of the season, but we want to be happy at the end.’”
They can get there, as long as they lay off the cheese.
