There was never much question about what Owen McCown would become. Football, and quarterback in particular, was written into the family bloodline long before he took his first snap.
McCown's father, Josh, spent 18 seasons in the NFL after starring at SMU and Sam Houston. His uncle Luke played 12 years in the league following a standout career at Louisiana Tech. Another uncle, Randy, quarterbacked Texas A&M in the late 1990s. Three brothers, three college quarterbacks, two lengthy NFL careers, all born and raised in the same small East Texas town.
That town was Jacksonville, and the man who shaped all three McCown brothers into quarterbacks was a young coach named Jeff Traylor.
Three decades later, Traylor is UTSA's head coach, and with Owen as his starting quarterback for the third consecutive season, the connection between the McCowns and Traylor has come full circle. Owen and Josh are the first father-son duo Traylor has coached, a fact that speaks to just how long this relationship has run and how naturally McCown's path to San Antonio unfolded.
Traylor has said the McCown toughness comes from the same place it always has, a farm-and-country upbringing that produces players who do not flinch. Owen is cut from the same cloth as his dad and uncles.
“As early as I can remember I had a love for the game,” McCown said. “Just growing up around football at the highest level. The ability to hang around facilities and little things like that, it helped grow a passion for it. My dad and family would say that we never had to play football, but when you grow up around it and you absorb it, you just want to play.”
McCown was born in Dallas but grew up on the move, following his father's NFL stops through Arizona, North Carolina and Texas before landing at Rusk High School, where he threw for more than 3,300 yards and 33 touchdowns as a senior.
“Honestly I always heard stories about the relationship (my family had with Coach Traylor) but growing up I never really met Coach Traylor and knew him like that until I got here,” McCown said. “It was just countless numbers of basketball stories from my dad and uncles because Coach Traylor coached my dad in basketball. It was more just little silly stories like that and obviously that relationship has really grown ever since I’ve been here.”
A three-star recruit, he signed with Colorado and started three games as a true freshman before transferring to UTSA in December 2022, a decision rooted in the family's decades-old trust in Traylor.
“It has been huge to get to grow here at UTSA,” McCown said. “I spent my first year at Colorado, playing in four games but getting to maintain a redshirt and have the ability to gain that extra year. UTSA was close in the recruiting process with me out of high school so when I hit the portal it was easy to pick UTSA.”
Since arriving, McCown has built one of the most productive quarterback careers in program history. He threw for 3,424 yards and 25 touchdowns in 2024, was named MVP of the Myrtle Beach Bowl, and set a program record with 434 passing yards at Tulsa. In 2025, he was even better, completing 67 percent of his passes for nearly 3,000 yards and 30 touchdowns, punctuated by a program-record 93.9 completion percentage against Tulane that earned him national player of the week honors, as the Roadrunners raced past the Green Wave behind his 370 yards and four TDs. He capped the season by throwing for 295 yards and three scores while being named MVP of the First Responder Bowl.
McCown enters this season as the American Conference's only third-year starting quarterback, a rare thread of continuity in an era defined by transfers and turnover. Opportunities to play elsewhere for his final year surely were on the table, but McCown stayed loyal to UTSA and loyal to the coach who once guided his father, his uncles, and now him, into an elite quarterback.
For McCown, the throughline has never been complicated. It runs from a fieldhouse in Jacksonville to the Alamodome, carried by a family name and a coach who never stopped believing in it.