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The UTSA Roadrunners head to Austin on Saturday as roughly 30-point underdogs against the No. 1-ranked Texas Longhorns. Kickoff at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium is at 7 p.m.
UTSA is coming off a 31-26 win over Texas State in the "Battle for I-35," but coach Jeff Traylor said this week that games against powerhouse programs such as Texas are becoming increasingly difficult to justify as the financial gap in college football widens.
"You just can't play guys that get paid $50-55 million dollars," he said of the amount top programs can spend on their rosters. "We got to get in the $20 million dollar ranges ... we got to get out of the business of playing A&M, LSU, and Texas."
Texas is among programs with an estimated football roster budget of roughly $45 million to $55 million this season, compared with about $4.5 million to $5 million for UTSA, according to The Athletic. Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian said Thursday that the Texas estimate was inaccurate and cautioned that roster-spending figures are difficult to verify because the underlying numbers are not fully public.
There is a financial incentive for UTSA to make the trip. Texas will pay the Roadrunners $1.7 million for Saturday’s game as part of a multigame scheduling agreement between the schools.
Traylor said the matchups can also exact a physical cost.
"You just pray you come home Saturday healthy," he said. "They're just so much bigger and so much more powerful than us."
"We'll try to devise a plan to help our kids, but at the same time, we've experienced a lot of losses and injuries from playing these guys through the years," he said. "We lost 2 or 3 to them last year for the year. And then the year, the last time we played them before last, we lost a couple more for the year. And that can happen anytime, let's make sure we say that. But the odds go up in these battles."
Saturday will be the third meeting between UTSA and Texas.
The Roadrunners gave the Longhorns a scare in their first matchup in 2022, taking a 17-7 lead in the second quarter and going into halftime tied 17-17 before Texas pulled away for a 41-20 win.
The gap looked much wider two years later, when Texas beat UTSA 56-7. Saturday’s game comes in an era when NIL compensation and revenue sharing have further widened the financial divide between the programs.
This will also be the first time UTSA has faced a team ranked No. 1 in both the AP Top 25 and AFCA Coaches Poll.
UTSA enters the game 2-0 after wins over UT Rio Grande Valley and Texas State. The victory over the Bobcats last weekend was the program’s 100th all-time win and gave the Roadrunners their first 2-0 start since 2021.
Texas is also 2-0 after rallying to beat then-No. 1 Ohio State 24-23 last weekend. The Longhorns trailed 23-3 entering the fourth quarter before scoring 21 unanswered points, a win that moved them from No. 4 to No. 1 in the AP Top 25.
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Traylor also has ties to Texas. He served on the Longhorns coaching staff in 2015 and 2016 before eventually taking over at UTSA.
The game will be streamed exclusively on SEC Network+ via the ESPN app.
