Rachel McCoy, Colt’s Wife: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Rachel McCoy has become well known over the past five years for her connection to the University of Texas, where her husband, Colt, led the Longhorns to the national championship game after the 2009 season.

But the former Rachel Glandorf is actually an alumnus of another Big 12 school in the Lone Star state, having graduated from Baylor University, where she was on the Bears’ track and field team.

Rachel and Colt were married in 2010, just before McCoy’s NFL career began as a backup for the Cleveland Browns. The two have since moved from Cleveland to Washington, McCoy is entering his second game as the Redskins starting quarterback following the benching of Robert Griffin III.

Read on for more about Rachel and her relationship with the Redskins’ backup quarterback.

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1. Rachel Met Colt When She Was an Intern at an Austin TV Station & Interviewed Him

Rachel, now 27, met Colt when she was an intern at KEYE TV in Austin in the summer of 2008 and Colt was the Longhorns starting quarterback.

Their relationship started as strictly professional — Rachel the journalist and Colt one of her interview subjects. But the two started dating shortly after they met.

Rachel talked about their courtship and first date in a 2010 interview with the Associated Press shortly before she and Colt got married.

From the AP story, via the Dallas Morning News.

“I interviewed him multiple times before we actually went out toward the end of the summer,” she said. “Originally, I tried not to date him. I heard he was a good guy. But you never know.”

On Date No. 1, Glandorf played it cool: she brought along a friend, to McCoy’s surprise.

“He wasn’t so happy about that,” she said.

Rachel told the AP that she and Colt initially tried to keep the relationship quiet. But when you’re dating the starting quarterback at the University of Texas and you’re constantly spotted in the stands at Longhorns games sitting with said quarterback’s parents — especially when you’re shown on TV — you’re not going to keep things quiet for very long.

“We didn’t want it to be uncomfortable for everyone,” she told the AP. “Once the season started and I was sitting with his parents is when everyone figured it out.”

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2. Rachel Was a Superstar Athlete in High School Who Went on to Run Track at Baylor

Rachel, who was born in Southern California but went to high school at Vail Christian High School in Colorado, hadn’t been used to the type of attention she got when she started dating Colt. But that’s not to say she was a stranger to the spotlight.

As Vail Daily reported in 2005, Rachel was a superstar athlete at Vail Christian, where the Daily described her as “easily the most accomplished athlete” in the school’s history.

Rachel played basketball and volleyball in addition to running track, but track was her best sport.

From Vail Daily:

Glandorf is easily Vail Christian’s most accomplished athlete in the young school’s history. She’s been all-league in volleyball three times and turned the trick four times in basketball. In the spring, she brought home bronze and silver in the 800 the last two years in the 2A-1A state track meet.

While she’s going to Baylor for track, basketball was originally her favorite sport. That started to change over the years as the newness of track appealed to her, while she felt she had done all that she could do in the sport of basketball.

“I’m thinking that if I want to go to a bigger school, I’m going to have to run track,” she said. “If I want to go to a smaller school, I can play basketball. Let’s face it, I’m better at track than I am at basketball.”

At Baylor, she competed in the 400-meter hurdles, finishing fifth in the event at the Dr. Pepper Invitational and ninth at the North Texas Invitational as a sophomore in 2007. You can read her bio on the Bears’ website here.

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3. Colt Proposed at the 50-Yard-Line A Week After UT Lost in the BCS Title Game

The 2010 BCS national championship game, played at the Rose Bowl between Texas and Alabama, was a disaster for McCoy. The QB left the game in the first half with a shoulder injury, then watched as his team lost 37-21 in what turned out to be the first of three Alabama titles in the next four years.

But McCoy’s fortunes changed quickly when he proposed to Rachel at the 50-yard-line in Royal-Memorial Stadium on January 11, a week after the title game.

From the AP:

That night McCoy told Glandorf that he had to pick up his cleats at Royal-Memorial Stadium.

“I had asked him a million times to go out on the field,” she said.

Each time McCoy had an excuse, but that night Glandorf had decided it was her last shot to be on the field.
“We were on the 50, and I turned to see ‘Rachel, I love you! Will you marry me? Colt,'” on the giant scoreboard screen, she said. “Then, I turned around to see him down on his knee. He left the day after we got engaged, and I didn’t see him for a month.”

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4. The McCoys Went Skeet Shooting at Their Wedding Reception

The McCoys’ wedding reception was a lively celebration that included a singing performance by country singer Aaron Watson and former Longhorns wide receiver Jordan Shipley.

It also included some skeet shooting — a sport at which Rachel apparently excels.

Colt explained the skeet shooting at a press conference before the 2012 Alamo Bowl:

That was at our reception. We had our reception at this place outside of Austin. We had a lot of people at our wedding, and that was part of the reception. If you wanted to shoot some skeet, you could. And when Rachel and I first got there, we walked over there. She hit it, by the way. She hit it.

Watch the video of the press conference above. (There’s no footage of the actual shooting session, unfortunately.)

Shipley, who was McCoy’s roommate and main target at Texas and went on to play three seasons in the NFL, did a good job as the backup vocalist on a song whose chorus was “When I grow up, I wanna be just like Colt McCoy.”

Watch the performance here:

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5. Rachel Caused a Minor Panic When She Talked About Possible NCAA Violations on ESPN Radio

A lot of Texas fans were nervous in 2011 when Rachel appeared on Colin Cowherd’s show on ESPN Radio and, when asked by Cowherd about the presence of boosters around the Longhorns’ program, described a culture in which many players were unable to say no to boosters offering gifts.

Yahoo! Sports’ Doug Farrar was one of many reporters who wrote about Rachel’s comments and speculated that the NCAA might be forced to open an investigation into the program.

Per Farrar, here’s some of what Rachel told Cowherd about things that were offered to McCoy and other players:

Regularly, it was just dinner … most people in Texas are just being friendly and they don’t mean anything by it at all. They don’t really realize I think, most of the time, that it’s a violation. And so, Texas is very strict about making it clear to all their players that you take absolutely nothing. I don’t care if it’s a hot dog, or a soda — that’s just the regular stuff.

But you’ve got guys who, like you were saying, are grown adult men with law degrees … you look at it and wonder, ‘What are they going to gain out of this?’ To me, it’s just to say, “Hey, I bought so-and-so dinner” or “Hey, I took so-and-so to do this.” These grown men, it’s just their pride, that’s all it is. And I [saw] it every day. My joke was that my biggest competition with Colt was not girls; it’s 40-year-old men who just want to say, “Hey, I did this with Colt and I did this with his teammates.” And really, it’s not going to improve their play at all; that’s not the issue. You have to go after these adult men who have these responsibilities and think about these kids.

It doesn’t matter if these [kids] come from nothing, or families who have everything. You cannot expect 19- and 20-year-old kids to say ‘No’ to free stuff when they’re in college. It’s silly, and we really do need to make something more set for these adults and hold them accountable. Because it’s not fair. Like you were saying, there’s really honestly no way these kids can say ‘No’ to some of this stuff. They don’t know half the time, I’m convinced. There’s so many things the NCAA is so careful about, it’s hard for these guys to know — “I can take this or I can’t, no one’s going to know.”

The comments did not lead to any kind of NCAA investigation of the program, but they did prompt athletic director DeLoss Dodds to issue a statement proclaiming that Longhorns officials “take compliance very seriously.”

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