With the opening of USF’s football season less than two months away, Green, Gold, and Bold will examine each opponent the Bulls will face in the 2025 season.
Here’s the ninth in the series.
Team: UTSA Roadrunners
When: Thursday, November 6, Raymond James Stadium, Time TBA.
Head coach: Jeff Traylor. In 2019, he took over a program that looked more like roadkill than Roadrunners. They had won only seven games combined in the two seasons before Traylor arrived.
Under Traylor, UTSA is 46-20.
Last year’s record: 7-6, capped by a 44-15 blowout of Coastal Carolina in the Myrtle Beach Bowl. UTSA started the season 3-5 but closed with a rush. The Roadrunners are a chic pick to possibly contend for the conference title.
Name to know: Owen McCown. He struggled at times to replace Frank Harris, a long-time fixture at quarterback, but McCown got better as the year went on.
He wound up leading the nation’s 12th-ranked offense to four wins in their last five games in 2024 and he has a lot to work with this season.
The biggest potential weakness: Defense was a significant problem for the Roadrunners last year. They allowed more than 30 points per game, including an inexplicable 46 points in a loss to an awful Tulsa team.
Traylor and his staff threw a lot of portal assets at that unit in the off-season, but we won’t say they’re better until they actually are better.
The biggest question mark: How will the Roadrunners navigate the closing stretch of their schedule?
After opening American Athletic Conference play with three very winnable games – against Temple, Rice, and North Texas – things start to get sticky for the Roadrunners.
Four of their last five games are against Tulane, USF, East Carolina, and Army. That stretch will show what they’re of – or what they aren’t made of.
Interesting things to know: Since 2020, UTSA is 29-3 at its home stadium, the Alamodome. That’s the third-best home mark in FBS.
UTSA didn’t play its first game in program history until 2011, after practicing for a full year beforehand.
After one season as an independent, the Roadrunners joined Conference USA. In 2023, they moved up to the AAC and are now on the radar for another possible move in the next round of college football realignment.