The brutal reality of being Jeff Traylor

Evaluate. Develop.

Longtime Gilmer head coach Jeff Traylor is one of the best in college football when it comes to evaluating and developing prospects at the Group of Six level as the seventh-year head coach of the UTSA Roadrunners.

From a roster-building standpoint, what comes next is what hurts — the poaching.

Although it’s not a problem specific to Traylor’s UTSA program because it’s happening around the country, the transfer portal has resulted in frequent departures for the Roadrunners. In the AAC specifically, Traylor says that 78 percent of the all-conference players enter the portal to play for bigger schools.

At UTSA, 11 of the 23 outgoing transfers from the 2025 window tracked by 247Sports landed at Power Four programs, including star wide receiver Devin McCuin decamping to Ohio State, tight end Houston Thomas landing at Texas A&M, and standout edge Kenny Ozowalu heading north to Oklahoma.

“None of us enjoy turning over our entire roster every year, but that is the way of the new game, right? So you’ve got to adapt or die,” Traylor told Horns247, echoing a phrase commonly used by Nick Saban and Steve Sarkisian.

With Traylor’s expertise on the offensive side of the ball, those players are a little bit easier to keep out of the portal. The defensive players almost always leave. At least with the end of the spring portal window, UTSA didn’t lose so many players they couldn’t replace this May, a frequent theme in previous years.

Texas has also been a beneficiary of Traylor’s evaluation and development.

In the 2021 class, UTSA made a late evaluation on an undersized edge player from Hill Country powerhouse Smithson Valley, the type of program that hardly goes overlooked by major recruiters. Trey Moore had just recorded 70 tackles, 19 tackles for loss, eight sacks, 16 quarterback hurries, five pass breakups, three forced fumbles, two fumble recoveries, and three blocked kicks as a senior in 2020, earning District 27-6A Defensive Player of the Year honors.

For those big programs, the problem was that Moore was a tweener, sized moderately well enough for the linebacker position, but lacking the height and length to have a clean projection on the edge, where the concern was that bigger offensive linemen would be able to swallow him up.

As Early Signing Day approached in 2020, Moore mostly held offers from the Ivy League and other smaller regional schools like Lafayette, Lamar, and UIW. UTSA offered in December, with North Texas and Hawaii joining in January. Moore waited until late July to commit to the Roadrunners and enrolled days later.

In a developmental redshirt season, Moore appeared in the final three games before breaking into the starting lineup in 2022 and notching 59 total tackles (30 solo), 18 tackles for loss (a school record), eight sacks, six pass breakups, five quarterback hurries, two forced fumbles, and a fumble recovery to earn Freshman All-American honors.

As Traylor publicly aired tampering allegations about his players, Moore decided to remain in San Antonio despite burgeoning SEC interest.

Moore was even better as a redshirt sophomore in 2023, securing AAC Defensive Player of the Year recognition after finishing the regular season with 45 total tackles (30 solo), 17.5 tackles for loss, and a school-record 14 sacks, adding an interception, forced fumble, and fumble recovery.

Into the portal, SEC schools were officially after Moore, including Alabama, LSU, and Texas, his dream school. Moore fulfilled his lifelong goal of playing for the Longhorns and performed well enough over two seasons on the Forty Acres to become a fourth-round selection of the Miami Dolphins in the 2026 NFL Draft.

Not bad for an unranked prospect Traylor turned into a star.

“If you really are about the player and you really are about your coaches, then you should celebrate all that,” Traylor said.

With all the outgoing players during the portal window this offseason, Traylor and his staff fell back on what they call “practice recruiting” — building relationships with recruits they knew were going to sign with bigger schools just in case they ended up in the portal after a year or two at the Power Four level.

Some of it ends up looking so transactional that Traylor jokes with Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire, another former Texas high school football coach, about a three-for-one trade. The Red Raiders get cornerback Davin Martin and the Roadrunners get wide receiver TJ West, edge Dylan Spencer, and defensive lineman Eddy Smith.

Traylor wants a future draft pick thrown in. McGuire is not hospitable.

But of the 40 players brought into the UTSA program, the coaching staff had a prior relationship with 37 of them.

“Something we have done a different mindset of this year is we went for production and character, and we didn’t chase talent as much as we have in the past,” Traylor said. “We won’t be as pretty as a team as you see me bring in there. You’ll look at us and go, they’re a little smaller, they’re not as fast because I do believe in G6, all of us are going to be similar.”

To gain an edge, Traylor uses similar culture-building techniques to the Culture Wednesdays held on the Forty Acres. At UTSA, Traylor call it the “triangle of toughness” — “their walk-up song, their favorite Bible verse, and their plan when the crap hits the fan.” The players share their story through their triangle, store them in their lockers, and take them with them on road trips.

“We’re really close. We’re a gritty group. Not as talented as we’ve been, but we’re gritty,” Traylor said.

On Traylor’s triangle, his why is his players and his staff.

“Everybody in this building is counting on me and this program to get them somewhere,” Traylor said.

And every year, for Traylor’s best players, that somewhere is a bigger schoool.