Four years after Oklahoma arrest, new Kentucky RB Seth McGowan sees greater purpose in football
Seth McGowan is not a man who wants to speak in cliches.
His path from highly touted high school recruit to convicted felon and back to the highest level of college football has taught him a simple quip is rarely enough to explain the full context of a situation. But even he acknowledges there is one aphorism that his journey has taught him is true.
“You never know what you got till it’s gone,” McGowan said in a one-on-one interview with the Herald-Leader after his first preseason practice with Kentucky.
McGowan has no trouble remembering the moment that lesson was pounded home for him.
He was a freshman at Oklahoma in April 2021, coming off an encouraging debut season where he totaled 571 yards and four touchdowns, when he made a decision that would derail his career. McGowan and two Sooners teammates stole marijuana, jewelry, high-dollar shoes and cash from a Norman, Oklahoma, apartment. One of the other players was armed with a gun during the incident.
The players were initially charged with robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Had they been convicted of those charges, they could have spent decades in prison. Instead, they pled guilty to larceny of a person at nighttime, a felony.
McGowan would spend three months in jail after his plea before a judge sentenced him to a year of probation. By then, he had already received the call from Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley telling him he had been kicked off the team.
“Me and Riley always had, like, a really, really tight relationship,” McGowan said. “So, just to hear that come from him, was like, damn. Like, I knew I really (messed) up. I knew I really stepped outside of my zone.”
It would have been easy for that to have been the end of McGowan’s story, another talented athlete to squander his opportunity.
But McGowan was laser focused on making good on the promise he made to “pursue life and fulfill my duties as a child of God,” in a letter he wrote to the judge before his sentencing hearing. His talent would give him a chance to rebound from his mistake in a way someone who was not a highly touted football player might not get, but it would not be easy.
McGowan entered the transfer portal after being dismissed from the team at Oklahoma but could not find a program willing to take him for the 2021 season while his legal case was still playing out. He eventually landed at NAIA Texas College, where former Oklahoma player Jarrail Jackson had recently been hired as coach, in 2022 but was held out of games for the first half of the season while he worked to prove he was back on the right path. McGowan spent 2023 at Butler Community College in Kansas.
“He worked like a DI athlete,” Jackson said. “His work ethic is unbelievable. … It was one of those deals where we were in transition at the school, like coming and changing the culture around. He did a good job of helping us change the culture.”
Multiple leads on potential landing spots fell through. There was real doubt that McGowan would ever get the chance to prove himself in a Division I program again.
Desperate for another opportunity, McGowan began to scroll through his old Twitter direct messages. He stumbled upon an old conversation with Syracuse offensive coordinator Jeff Nixon from when Nixon, then a position coach at Baylor, had offered him a scholarship early in his high school career.
Nixon did not have a spot for McGowan at Syracuse, but he connected him with David Cobb, who Nixon had worked with for the Carolina Panthers. Cobb, now the running backs coach at New Mexico State, finally gave McGowan the opportunity he had been searching for, but there was still work to do with multiple hurdles to jump to verify his eligibility to play Division I football after his odyssey through the lower levels of college football.
“There were a lot of things that told me that this wasn’t possible, or a lot of people that told me that it wasn’t possible,” McGowan said.
Cobb’s work to get McGowan eligible paid off with a breakout season in 2024.
McGowan totaled 152 carries for 823 yards and three touchdowns. He caught 23 passes for 277 yards and three more scores. Now four years removed from his freshman season at Oklahoma, McGowan was a second-team All-Conference USA running back who had shown the potential to thrive at an even higher level with 14 carries for 75 yards in a November game at Texas A&M.
“That was one of my favorite moments in life, just those five, six months that I was there, because I was so grateful,” McGowan said.
In the transfer portal era where Power Four programs raid Group of Five conference rosters every offseason, McGowan’s performance made him a lock to receive transfer interest, but he initially resisted the temptation to leave New Mexico State. He briefly entered his name into the transfer portal in December but removed it after just one day, telling the Las Cruces Sun-News that his connection with the New Mexico State staff was too strong to abandon.
But the reality of McGowan’s situation continued to weigh on him.
With just one season of eligibility remaining, he would need to perform on the biggest stage to have the best chance at earning a spot on an NFL roster. He reentered the portal after spring practice, eventually choosing to reunite with Kentucky running backs coach Jay Boulware, the assistant who had initially recruited him to Oklahoma, in Lexington.
“I’m gonna do the best thing for me and my family regardless,” McGowan said. “So, me leaving there was nothing personal. Doesn’t reflect, like at all, the relationship I had with the coaches there and with the staff and just everyone. Me leaving doesn’t reflect that at all.”
How Seth McGowan can help Kentucky football
Early reviews of McGowan’s performance in summer workouts and preseason OTAs at Kentucky have been stellar. There is growing buzz around the program that he could emerge as the featured back in a rotation that should also include Nebraska transfer Donte Dowdell and returnees Jamarion Wilcox and Jason Patterson.
“He’s a big-time player,” UK coach Mark Stoops said this week. “He’s good in a lot of areas. He’s explosive. He’s got a lot of experience. He’s dynamic.”
Proving he can carry the load for an SEC team would go a long way to putting McGowan back on the radar for NFL scouts, but he has bigger plans for what is next as well.
McGowan acknowledges it took time for him to let down his guard at New Mexico State. His legal trouble, three years away from Division I football and the death of his brother by suicide earlier that year had made him more guarded. He was also rehabbing from a torn pectoral muscle, limiting his ability to participate in offseason workouts. McGowan played in just one live scrimmage before the season.
But along the way McGowan learned to embrace what he sees as his greater purpose in life.
“If I can help a guy struggling with something, especially with something that I too struggled with in the past, like, I always have a deep itch to just correct it and get people out of their own way,” McGowan said. “Because a lot of times, that’s all it is. These players just be in their own way, or they’ve never been told the proper approach, never been taught the proper approach.
“That was my struggle my freshman year (at Oklahoma). None of my family was really in college, like graduating. My parents didn’t graduate, so I didn’t really know too much about what it was like. … I was lost my freshman year, and so that’s how I relate to a lot of these guys that are also just a little bit off balance.”
McGowan now has a list of red flags to look for in young players. Even if they are not in danger of breaking the law like he did, those issues can contribute to missed opportunities for the team and player.
If a teammate shows up just as a meeting is scheduled to start obviously ill-prepared, McGowan takes note. If a player is the first to leave a workout or team gathering, McGowan takes note. If someone is obviously giving less than full effort on some plays, McGowan takes note.
“There’s always somebody that’s trying to find the edge on a way to compete better,” he said. “You see a guy not really embodying that, that’s a quick way for me to tell that they got just a little bit of growing to do.
“And that’s fine. That’s what the veterans are for, to help get some of these players get out of their own way so you know they can be everything that they want to be.”
If McGowan can duplicate his New Mexico State breakout against SEC competition, becoming a factor as both a runner and pass-catcher in Kentucky’s offense, he could end up being one of the most impactful additions in a massive UK transfer class. But if he can use his personal experience to help lead younger players away from similar mistakes, his addition could go even further to helping rebuild the blue-collar culture that characterized most of Stoops’ tenure.
That might come as a surprise to the segment of the fan base who questioned how adding a player who spent three months in jail fit into offseason talk of fixing locker-room culture issues. The presence of Boulware on the staff helped assure Stoops that McGowan was a positive addition to the program though, as did his other connections at Oklahoma, where his brother Bob was a legendary coach.
“He’s really come a long way,” Stoops said. “He’s learned. He’s made a mistake. He has to make the most of it.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2025 at 6:30 AM.