The University of Houston has a new head football coach after making its rumored hire official on Monday.
Willie Fritz, who spent the last eight seasons leading the Tulane Green Wave to new heights, arrived in Houston on Sunday night and was introduced as the 16th head coach in program history the following day.
“What we realized, even before we decided to make a change, is that to coach football at the University of Houston was different than it was two years ago, three years ago, [and] five years ago,” said the chair of the Houston board of regents, Tilman Fertitta, as he addressed the crowd. “[T]his was a job that was highly, highly sought after by a lot of coaches, so we didn’t have to settle. … We got the person that we wanted, and that’s this gentleman right here.”
Houston conducted a coaching search that focused on 10 candidates, later narrowed to five, and hired Fritz just a week after relieving Dana Holgorsen of his head coaching duties.
“Really what it comes down to is Coach Fritz is a great coach, a proven winner everywhere he’s been, a program builder, and I think what you’ll see that we’ve seen, even a better person and somebody I couldn’t be more proud to lead our program,” vice president of athletics Chris Pezman explained.
Much of Fritz’s background has come out of the state of Texas, holding assistant roles at Sam Houston State and Willis High School before taking his first head coaching job at Blinn College in Brenham, which catapulted him to head coaching jobs at Central Missouri, Sam Houston State, Georgia Southern, and Tulane.
“A lot of people start out on third base and think they’ve hit a home run, or they think they’ve hit a triple,” he told the crowd. “It took me a long time to get around the bases, and I finally got my home run by getting this job that’s a dream at the University of Houston.”
Now that he has returned, he wants to lean on the relationships he has built and the abundance of football talent in the state to help rebuild the Houston program.
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t,” he elaborated. “The best football in the country is played here in the state, and I’m fortunate enough that I know a bunch of the high school coaches, and I’m excited to renew my acquaintances with those guys.”
Fritz also told the crowd he has been following the same formula he established in 1993 when he got his first head coaching job, emphasizing ball security, discipline, the running game, and finishing in the fourth quarter.
His work at Tulane was one of the more remarkable rebuilds in modern college football history, focusing on three objectives: recruit, retain, and develop. That approach allowed him to take a 2-10 team to the pinnacle of the Group of Five with an 11-win season just a year later, culminating in a Cotton Bowl win over USC, followed by another conference championship game appearance this season.
“It was a tough rebuild,” he acknowledged, “but our players did something that people thought was never going to be accomplished at Tulane.”
In taking the Houston job, he is betting on himself and his formula again, and he said he is confident he can restore a once proud program.
“Houston has had some great teams,” he remarked. “It’s not like it hasn’t been done here before. We just want to do it again, and we want to do it consistently year after year after year after year. That’s the goal here.”
