[2] Owens attended college at the University of Oklahoma (OU), where he was a three-year letterman under head coach Bruce Drake.
In Owens' tenure at KU, he won six Big Eight Conference titles and advanced to the NCAA tournament seven times.
Kansas has not suffered a losing season since, and has only missed the NCAA tournament once since then, in 1988–89 when the program was on probation for recruiting violations committed by Owens' successor, Larry Brown.
In four seasons his teams never won fewer than 20 games and three times advanced to the NJCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship semifinals.
Owens had a brief stint of coaching at Oral Roberts University (1985–87), and then in Israel with Maccabi Tel Aviv during the 1989–90 season, before being fired in February 1990.
[1] After leaving St. Leo, a friend invited him to return to Tulsa and work as an investment adviser for First Capital Management, where he spent the next ten years.