Willie Fritz Reveals A Secret to His Success of Turning Around Multiple Football Programs
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Houston’s head coach Willie Fritz has one of the best overall resumes of any coach in all of college football.
He’s won conference championships, coach of the year awards, and consistently produces NFL talent, and he even won a national title at Blinn early in his career.
Fritz knows how to win, and he also knows how to rebuild a program from scratch into a team that can compete at the highest level. He revealed a major component in that winning formula at the Big 12 Media Days earlier this week.
How Willie Fritz’s Formula Could Bring Houston A Big 12 Championship
Across his 33-year career as a head football coach, Fritz has had success at every school he has been which include Blinn, Central Missouri, Sam Houston State, Georgia Southern, Tulane and now the University of Houston.
While he has just about every accolade that a person could possibly get, Fritz also backed up his claim to fame by engineering the largest single season turnaround in the country at Houston from 2024 to 2025.
While a turn around like that in a major conference takes more than just one factor, Fritz revealed the centerpiece of why he was able to turn Houston into a contending team so quickly.
”We are just trying to bring in the right guys,” Fritz said at Big 12 Media Days. “I work too hard to be around guys that don't know how to act. It’s hard for me to change someone who’s had a bad 18 years so I’m trying to find those guys that have had a good 18 years. We will shine and polish them and help them through that transition from 18-22 years of age.”
The key to Fritz’s success is not about spending the most money or bringing in the most talented player at every position, it is about bringing in players who fit Houston’s culture, and that is a lost practice in today’s game.
Many programs today rely on bringing in the best talent no matter what their character is because that is how they stay competitive in the era of NIL and the transfer portal.
For Fritz, it's about bringing in guys that fit your program’s culture, and he showed how successful that tactic could be last season.
After winning just four games in his first year coaching at Houston in 2024, Fritz hit the portal hard and brought in several players from very different backgrounds.
Some of the key players include Conner Weigman, Tanner Koziol, Dean Connors and Amare Thomas.
All these guys have one thing in common and it is that they are all good guys who were raised right and they handle themselves the right way on and off the field.
Because they bought into Fritz’s winning formula, the Cougars went on to have a historic 10-win season in 2025, and that is only the beginning.
Now, Houston has several veteran returners back for 2026 as well as another strong transfer portal and high school class.
With the combination of talent in the program along with Fritz at the helm, Houston has its eyes set on its first Big 12 Title this season.
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Ashton Grissom is a staff writer for Houston Cougars on SI. He is currently a senior at the University of Houston and majoring in Sports Media Production with a minor in Marketing and Spanish. He also works for two student organizations: The Cougar and CoogTV. You can find Grissom on his Instagram (@ashtonagrissom8) or Twitter (@ashtongrissom8).