Willie Fritz strikes the balance at battle-hardened Houston
Forever finding their place between the bluebloods and the bottom feeders, the Cougars turn to one of the G5's greatest program builders.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
We’ve talked Texas football once in this offseason already, delving into the difficult task before Scotty Walden as he takes over at far-flung UTEP, and in a couple months’ time we’ll be looking at Texas A&M’s consequential choice to move on from Jimbo Fisher and hire the up-and-coming Mike Elko. One could imagine those two programs as lying near opposite ends of the local-ties spectrum in this state: the former a case where a close understanding of the Lone Star State isn’t all too important because of how disconnected El Paso is from Texas’ main recruiting regions, and the latter a case where it’s about as vital as anywhere outside of Austin.
Now, obviously, programs often buck these trends—Elko was a firmly midwestern coach before A&M poached him from Notre Dame as their new defensive coordinator in 2018, and Walden’s history as a player and coach in Texas was certainly a factor in UTEP’s decision to hire him. But every program here gives serious thought not just to who’s been in the region, but specifically who knows the state by heart, when bringing in a new coach. Understanding and networking with Texas high schools is practically a requirement to recruit and win at any FBS program in the region.
On that spectrum measuring the vitality of those local ties to a new hire, as in so many other ways, Houston seems caught between both ends. Indeed, for decades, this program seemed to exist in the liminal space between the P5 and the G5, dating back well before those terms existed. Ever since they entered the SWC in 1976, the Cougars have always seen themselves as either a power-conference program or—between 1996, when they moved to CUSA, and 2022, when they departed the AAC—one of the top names on the list of candidates to move back up in realignment.
Yet in many ways, that prominence and their frequent eras of success have led to them becoming the sport’s most outstanding stepping stone. Art Briles (2008), Kevin Sumlin (2012), and Tom Herman (2017) make for a rather impressive list of recent coaches…who all ended up parlaying success at Houston into jobs at power programs in the state, leaving the team to rebuild and once again make its case for a spot in the top ranks. Even now, with the Big 12 finally extending them an invite, there’s an asterisk attached to their new P5 membership: the P5 doesn’t really exist anymore, certainly not in five conferences with the Pac-12 collapsing, and probably not in four either. When the dust settles, the Cougars will once again be in a second-rate league, albeit a better one than Conference USA or the American. In all likelihood, coaches who win here will still be entertaining offers to “move up” and take over at Texas or A&M.
All this uncertainty and reinforcement of the program’s second-tier status has led to a long, determined effort to keep building it up. In some ways, it’s been a successful one; programs like Baylor, TCU, and Texas Tech are now conference rivals, and probably not a direct step up from Houston, the way they once would have been. And, of course, vital to that effort has been determining how the Cougars can fit into the Texas recruiting region without accentuating their place behind other programs in the state. To maximize their potential, they need to take advantage of the vast wealth of talent at their disposal, yet with enough tact and prudence to avoid directly losing a lot of battles over their status as a CUSA/AAC/Big 12 team.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to a great deal of variety in how clearly Texas their hires have been. Dana Dimel had never coached in the state before coming to the Cougars; Briles, meanwhile, was a born-and-raised Texan who had never played or coached a season anywhere else. Sumlin had nothing but two seasons at A&M when Houston hired him, and Tony Levine only a decade-old three-year stint on the Texas State staff; Herman, on the other hand, got his master’s from UT-Austin and spent the first decade of his coaching career in the state. Major Applewhite was a Texas grad and longtime assistant; Dana Holgorsen, who was fired after a disappointing 4-8 season last year, coached in Texas for a decade but had spent another decade elsewhere upon his hire here.
In this complicated ledger of those who know the state inside and out and those who have barely set foot in it, Willie Fritz fits Houston perfectly in that he lands somewhere in the middle. The 64-year-old has been all over the map, with a career that includes some local stops—as a Sam Houston State grad assistant (1984-85), an assistant at Willis High School (1986), a defensive coach back at SHSU (1991-92), and a head coach at Blinn JC (1993-96) and SHSU (2010-13). In between, though, are numerous tenures elsewhere—Pittsburg State, Shawnee Mission NW, Coffeyville (all in Kansas), Central Missouri, Georgia Southern, and most recently Tulane in nearby Louisiana. Nothing has taken him too far, and he obviously has plenty of local familiarity, but he also fits into the tradition of Houston coaches coming home after spending many years outside the state.
Obviously, this is all secondary to the fact that Fritz is an incredible coach, with a remarkable 247-121 career record across five different stops. Most recently, of course, he guided Tulane to a 23-4 mark across his last two seasons there, taking the Green Wave to a top-ten finish and a Cotton Bowl finish after they went nearly a quarter-century without even appearing in the AP Poll once. Nobody doubts that he has the credentials to be an equally brilliant coach in a power league; it’s only surprising that it took this long for a top program to hire him.
But what makes this hire so meaningful for Houston goes beyond the fact that it’s a good one. As ever, the Cougars are trying to strike a difficult balance—much like their recruiting battles, their coaching searches pose the nigh-impossible question of finding somebody ideal for the job who wouldn’t also jump for a chance to go to UT or A&M.
Whether Fritz fits that ideal profile is, on some level, impossible to know until he stays or doesn’t, but he’s certainly saying all the right things. “I finally got my home run by getting this job, it’s a dream,” he said in his introductory pressure conference. “We just want to [have great teams] again and do it consistently year after year. That’s the goal here.” If he intends to follow through whether or not the heavy hitters come calling, it’s hard to think of a more perfect fit for a program endlessly striving to better itself.
The Last Five Years
One of the nice things about hiring Fritz is that, simply put, he runs a tight ship. It’s hard to think of a coach more different from Holgorsen, whose five years at Houston were endlessly entertaining, barely-controlled chaos. In five years, he dragged UH to the depths of the AAC—taking over an eight-win team and turning them into an eight-loss team—then to the top—leading them to a 12-2 season and a top-20 finish in 2021—and then, upon their arrival in the Big 12, right back to the bottom of their new league. On paper, you could argue this was a somewhat hasty firing given Houston’s 20-7 record over the previous two seasons, but the messiness of Holgorsen’s tenure gave the Cougars little reason to keep him around any longer than they needed to.
Despite the coaching turnover, and probably in part because Fritz is such an exciting hire, the program managed to hold onto a pretty solid chunk of its roster on both offense and defense. Houston hit the ground running with a solid showing on National Signing Day, signing 22 transfers (18 from FBS) and setting themselves up extremely well on the offensive side of the ball, most notably with four-star high school recruits J’Marion Burnette and JayShon Ridgle. Not all of that talent will come into play immediately, of course, but good coaching and a reasonably experienced roster should put the Cougars in position to hang with the Big 12’s more established members, possibly enough to put them in contention for a bowl.
The Next Five Years
I’ll preface this statement with a reminder that there’s no such thing as a guaranteed good hire, but even so, 2024 has been a great offseason for the coaching carousel. I’ve already described why Bryant Vincent at ULM, Bronco Mendenhall at New Mexico, and Sean Lewis at SDSU seem such blatantly obvious excellent picks, and there are plenty more still to come in this series. I’d have a hard time picking my favorite just of those three, and throwing in all the great hires ahead would make it an impossible choice.
That being the case, I’ll refrain from saying Fritz is the best hire of the year, but he’s certainly up there. He’s won everywhere he’s gone, has extensive local ties, is well-liked by just about everybody in the sport, and is clearly passionate about taking on this job. Arguably the biggest risk of this hire is the possibility that a high-level program snatches him away in the next few years, and even that doesn’t feel like an imminent concern given how excited he is to be here1.
Again, though, there are no sure things. Success didn’t come to Fritz immediately at Tulane, and one wonders how his first six seasons there (4-8, 5-7, 7-6, 7-6, 6-6, 2-10) would play at a program not far removed from university president Renu Khator’s now-infamous 2016 quote at the start of Applewhite’s short-lived tenure: “We’ll fire coaches at 8-4”. The Cougars might need to be patient, and they might never find success under Fritz at all; such things are a possibility no matter how good the pick. But the best hires minimize those chances and maximize the chances of a program taking the next step up, and it’s hard to imagine a hire more likely to build that bright future at Houston than the inimitable architect that Willie Fritz is.
It doesn’t hurt that Steve Sarkisian is currently deeply entrenched at Texas, nor that Texas A&M just paid a massive buyout to switch from Fisher to Elko; neither of those programs, the two likeliest to try and tempt Fritz if they have an opening, is likely to need a new coach for at least a few years.