College football: A look inside UTSA’s dream season

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

America’s "other" unbeaten college football team is enjoying itself immensely. No, not Cincinnati, the other one, the one that doesn’t have a spot in the top 10 of the rankings, no shot at playing in the College Football Playoff, just a chance for a season that’s perfect in every way.

If the UTSA Roadrunners — the University of Texas at San Antonio — thought the only way things could get better than 10-0 was to go 11-0, they were wrong. For while an 11th straight triumph did indeed happen on Saturday afternoon, the way it came about appeared to confirm what those who follow the Roadrunners have suspected for a while.

That yes, indeed, this season appears to be a dream.

There is much to like about Cincinnati and its bold bid to upstage an entire system that confers scant favor to the little guys from outside the prestige conferences. There is, perhaps, even more to celebrate about UTSA, a program that has existed for only 10 years and for whom the Saturday crowd of 35,147 at the Alamodome was the largest of the season.

What a show they saw. The only reason UTSA has gotten a little national attention within the sea of America’s college football programs these past few weeks is because the Roadrunners are, along with No. 1 Georgia and Cincy, the only remaining undefeated teams in the land.

For a while, it looked like that was about to end on Saturday. With a touch over a minute to go in the Roadrunners’ matchup against UAB, the Blazers had a fourth-and-inches, no more than the width of a football, to ice the game. Instead, they opted to punt it away, and that’s when all the madness started.

"If you watch the games enough you’ve kind of figured out where we struggle at certain things," UTSA head coach Jeff Traylor told reporters. "We do our best to cover that up. But here’s something that’s never ever wrong with my team. It’s their effort. They never ever go away."

Starting at his own 23 and trailing 31-27, quarterback Frank Harris went to work. With a minute left he found big tight end Oscar Cardenas at midfield. With 35 seconds to go, he floated one 40 yards to De’Corian Clark, who reeled in a spectacular catch. From the 10, he tried to run it in himself and got stopped at the 1-yard line.

With time about to expire, the final play was out of a movie. Harris dropped the snap, which looked to have ended his hopes of finding Cardenas, who had been wide open but was now covered. He threw it to him anyway.

The ball actually only deflected off of one defender’s hand, but Traylor tells it more cinematically — "it bounced off two linebackers, the goalpost, went back to Oscar and we won it, right" — a catch that caused the place to just explode, the mayhem so complete that the commentator temporarily forgot the game situation and tried to end the telecast, forgetting there was still a tick on the clock and an extra point and kickoff to be completed.

There is still a regular-season game to go and a Conference USA Championship to be played. There is nothing they can do to elevate much higher nationally — they’re ranked below three-loss Texas A&M in the Coaches Poll. Who knows what comes next? Right now, who cares? If this was Hollywood, Harris-to-Cardenas on the final play might be the moment where they start rolling the credits.

"It was the height of what Roadrunners football can be, but for now they don’t need to worry about their ceiling," wrote Mike Finger in the San Antonio Express-News. "If this was it, with undeniable big-game vibes turning downtown into a daylong tailgate party and the quality of play proving worthy of the hype, they can work with that."

Do yourself a favor this weekend. Amid the swath of college football matchups, many of which will have a greater impact on the rankings and the playoff picture, spare a little time to watch UTSA as they take on North Texas on the road and seek to complete an undefeated season.

They’re fun and they’re courageous and they play a heck of a game. More than anything, this season has reminded us that it is really difficult to win every single week, whatever your schedule looks like and whatever a computer or a poll or a committee might say.

As for committees, CFP commissioner Gary Barta accidentally referred to the school as USTA, the acronym for the United States Tennis Association, when justifying the decision to leave them off an earlier list, prompting Traylor and his team to release social media posts of players photoshopped onto tennis stars’ bodies.

That cheekiness aside, they should rise from No. 22 in this week’s rankings, though likely not as high as their new AP mark of No. 15.

There is a sense that the likable Traylor is doing it for the little guy, representing the mass of Texas high school coaches who know what they’re doing but never get the chance at a higher level. His shot came late — he was still coaching high school until he turned 46 — before assisting at Texas, SMU and Arkansas, and then being named the head coach at UTSA. They like him there, of course they do, enough to recently hand out a 10-year, $28 million contract.

"The path has left him as a crackling conversationalist without slickness, and the grounded nature of that path might teach us some things, foremost this: The landscape crawls with damned-excellent coaches you never heard of," wrote the Washington Post’s Chuck Culpepper.

Traylor’s players are spirited and honest and has some genuine talent. They’re doing a good job of trying to build the program for the present and the future. All of them know the key facts to drop into interviews, too; how San Antonio is the seventh-biggest city in the nation, the extent of investment in UTSA football and the new training facility.

There are bigger stories in college football, grander ones, from bigger schools and bigger conferences. UTSA knows where it stands in the pecking order and, as long as you get its name right, it doesn’t have any complaints. You don’t get the impression Traylor and his men would follow UCF’s mold from a few years ago and proclaim themselves national champions if the whole campaign ends undefeated.

For they’re enjoying a moment, a real moment, even if it feels like a dream.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.