Rick Bowie takes over a Roadrunner offense that has ranked as a Top 15 scoring unit in three of the past five seasons and hasn’t ranked outside the Top 33 since 2020, which was Jeff Traylor’s first season at UTSA. Bowie is the fourth offensive coordinator Traylor has hired in San Antonio. 

The offense was 14th nationally in scoring offense last year with 35.5 points per game, but that doesn’t tell the full story. The Roadrunners averaged 45.3 points per game at home compared to 24.2 points per game on the road. That discrepancy was one of the main reasons the program has struggled on the road the last two seasons. Traylor said he wanted a simpler system and a new OC that was known as a great teacher, and he found that in Bowie. 

During our stop in San Antonio for the 2026 summer magazine, I sat down with Bowie and picked his brain about his background and offensive philosophy. 

Q: What was intriguing about the UTSA job and why was this the next stop for you?

Bowie: First off, getting back to the state was important. My wife is from the Cypress area. I was at West Virginia with Coach Holgorsen, so when he took the Houston job it made a ton of sense for us because that was home for her. I took my first job at Valdosta State in Georgia then came right back (to Texas) to Abilene Christian And when we leave for Western Kentucky and come right back for UTSA. I always joke with her that I’m not from the area, but I’ve been trying to get adopted for a while now.   

And then, Coach Traylor is the other reason. He’s such an amazing person, first and foremost, and he does such a great job with his culture and I think that is known nationwide. That’s something I’m excited to be a part of and I’m excited to work for a guy like that. And so, that was the most excited thing about this job, is just the ability to work for him. 

Q: Where did your offensive philosophies come from? How did you build your style and your schemes? 

Bowie: I was an offensive coordinator at the high school level and then I went to college and it is amazing how you don’t know what you don’t know. I learned so much from Coach Holgorsen and he had so many impressive people on that staff like Jake Spavital. Spav has been great to me for no reason and I owe a lot to Spav and Dana. And then Shannon Dawson was on that Houston staff, so I got to learn a lot from him. So, it is a little bit of combining things from all those people and then this will be my fifth year as a play caller, so you pick up little tidbits along the way. I liken it to a game of telephone where you take it for what it is and then with each step it kind of grows, and I would say improves. 

What’s a little interesting about my journey is that it was one-for-one hires every step of the way, so I’ve never brought anybody with me, which is scary to people. But for me, it has been a blessing because it’s just improved and subtly tweaked (the offense) everywhere you go because you’re in rooms with really smart people who might see it a little different than I do or whatever. 

So, I would say the genesis is those guys and I’m proud to be part of the Air Raid tree. 

Q: When you come to a new place, what is the process of installing that offense look like? 

Bowie: The beauty of doing it a couple times, and this is my fourth time that I’ve come to a new place to install it, is that you get comfortable with the calendar. Some of the mistakes you make early on is being in a panicked rush to get it all in because you don’t understand the time that you have. With a firmer understanding of the calendar, you can kind of be patient and intelligent with the quantity of time spent on each install. And so, I think we do a pretty good job of teaching it. 

You start with the base stuff over the course of a couple of weeks and then there is the situational part of the game that is always being taught and improved. And then you find little things that helps expand the schemes and that is always ongoing. Football is not played in a vacuum and installs always take place on 1st and 10 on the 35-yard line but that isn’t how football is played. There is down, distance, yard line, hash, timeouts, score, play clock and all that stuff that impacts the game and that is where the real coaching happens. 

Q: How do you describe your offense at the 3,000-foot view?

Bowie: We like to say we’re an aggressive, attacking style of offense. Whatever we need to do to be aggressive and attacking, we’ll do. We do think the defense aligns to us, so we want to make sure that we’re always pushing the pedal. We do that in multiple different ways. The base started as the Air Raid, and I call that the steak, and then it just gets seasoned differently every step of the way. Just look at all the different people that have taken this great offense and have seasoned it differently at various spots around the country, particularly in this state. 

We want to be an aggressive style offense but we personalize it to our personnel. Any good coach is going to tell you that it doesn’t matter what I want the offense to be, it is what the players are good at. So, what is your base personnel grouping going to be, but also, what does each individual player good at? Ultimately, it is a player’s game, so that is our main focus. We want to play great pace. We want to be based out of an up-tempo offense because we say that is easier to say “hey, now” than “giddy up.” It is easier to slow people down and huddle when you need to than it is to speed it up when the game dictates it. 

Q: Do you have any metrics or markers for success that you use to judge the offense’s performance? 

Bowie: I think that's ever changing. When I first started, there were four main statistics that we obsessed over: yards per play, third down efficiency, red zone efficiency, and turnovers. But now, in this world of analytics, there's so much information. We have so many smart people on this staff that I that we've done a really great job of looking at what actually impacts wins. There's a drastic misunderstanding of where runs and wins come from, so you're just constantly trying to evolve. Coach Traylor says there it’s always a tiny bit of gray. You want the numbers to tell you one thing, but you also have your eyes and experience of coaching the game for a while. 

Q: You’re known as a guy who likes the throw the ball around. With UTSA’s running back room, do you think there is more balance this year? 

Bowie: We’re doing whatever is going to win us the game. I make that quite clear; statistics are secondary. It is way easier to just tell people your record than it is to dump your statistics on them. So, we’re doing whatever it takes to win a game and I don’t give a darn if that’s running the ball 70 times or throwing the ball 70 times. 

I do that that balance can be a little overrated in terms of 50 percent run, 50 percent pass because that isn’t based on what the defense is giving you. There are defenses that are going to let you throw it all you want and, similarly, there are defenses that are trying to force you to run it. It says it in the Triangle of Toughness – run the ball. So, we’re always going to do that and we’re passionate about doing that. But also, it just depends on what the defense gives you and what your personnel does best. I know I’m seen as one of the wacky Air Raid guys that wants to throw it all the time, but that just depends on what the defense gives you and we will have answers built in to beat the defense regardless of what they give us.