The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Cougars Head Coach Willie Fritz Talks Recruiting In Houston, Matchup At Arizona

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Prior to their bye week, the Houston Cougars pulled off an upset over ranked Kansas State, defeating the Wildcats 24-19 on Nov. 2. The Cougars will look to carry this momentum into Tucson, where they will face the Arizona Wildcats on Friday. Head coach Willie Fritz joins "The Matt Thomas Show with Ross" to preview the upcoming matchup but also talk about the future of the team and his recent recruiting efforts within the greater Houston area.

Time now for our weekly visit with the head football coach of your Houston Cougars. Our Cougars are going to be on the road this Friday in Tucson, Arizona, the take on the Wildcats. It'll be an 815 pregame show on 950 KPRC kick time at 915, which means coach Fritz, Willie, you guys can get back to Houston Saturday morning and just enough to cook breakfast with the team at about 6 o'clock in the morning it feels like. Exactly right. It's going to be a little bit different game.

We played some late games so far. this season. So this will be another one, but this will be even later. So we're doing a few things a little different in terms of when we get up, letting the guys go back to sleep in the afternoon. I'm sure they'll enjoy that. And they're kind of fixing our, you know, our adjusting our eating schedule as well, too. So it'll be interesting. We're excited about going out there. I've never played a game out there before. I heard it's a really nice stadium and venue, so I'm looking forward to it. Let me ask you this. And you have been around and played all different time slots from 11 to 9 o'clock at night.

What is the best time to play a football game on the road and what's the worst? And maybe does it change for home games too? Oh, I'll be honest. I like playing early games myself. You get a little bit of time off after the ball game and things. So you don't have the anticipation of the game, you know, hanging over you at, you know, all morning, afternoon and the end of the evening. So that's what I like. It doesn't matter whatever it is.

And they tell us to do, we'll adjust to it and do the very best we can. Look, you put in, your players do, your staff does the heart and soul of an entire week of play. And if you win a game or you lose a game, you're going to obviously be still, you know, full of emotions. Is it easy to go to bed after a game? Do you need an hour to decompress? Does it make it a sleepless night? How does the Fritz family, you, the bride, the kids? What is it like trying to decompress after working so hard for six days to play that one game on the seventh day?

Oh, we usually have to go home watching a little TV. You know, watch some games. My wife and I sit around and talk and visit because I haven't had a chance to see her a whole lot, especially in home games. I stayed in hotel at home games, and she stays at the house. So it's good that we're able to talk and visit for a little while. And then we start about 1 o'clock on Sunday. So we have a little bit of time, you know, on Sunday morning.

So that's how we kind of do. I'm assuming during this time you had some guys heal up a little bit. You had a chance for probably you as a coaching staff to get on the road and do some recruiting. This would be your first in-season run recruiting the state of Texas wearing the University of Houston gear. What are some observations you've seen so far from Texas high school football this season? Oh, it's been great. to a game last Friday night. I guess I can't save the game I went to, but one of the top games in the state.

And it was really exciting. So I saw a lot of crowd and two really good teams, very competitive game, really enjoyed it. And kind of after first quarter, I kind of talked to the guy standing next to me. I said, you know, this is why I came back to the state of Texas to see great high school games like this. Then I went around to his school schools on Thursday. any Friday, so to my staff. So it's fun to jump in a car and have any direction and find great football players.

Do you balance on the big scale of things what they do on a Friday night as compared to what they do when they come to your camps or you've had a chance to visit with them? How do you balance that out? It's fun to watch them from the sideline. I don't get an opportunity to do that very often, but you need to see how they interact with your teammates. you know and how hard they really do play you're able to kind of see that a little bit differently

when you're out there you know blocking on the perimeter if they're a receiver and how hard they chase the ball if they're a defensive player so yeah there's a huge advantage to actually going to games I've gone to games before where I was on the fence about recruiting a guy and I said you know hey this is a guy I got to have in our programs and I've, Bob, maybe, hey, this is a guy I really got to have, and I've got to watch him playing in person. Man, I don't want this guy playing for me.

I don't know if I can get him switched to how we do things here at the university, Houston, or wherever I was at. We've got a huge advantage of one of the games and watching guys in Perkins. Unfortunately, the NCAA limits you in how many games you can go to and you just don't get to do it very often. Well, I know that the off time is good, but, man, the momentum that this program had after beating Kansas, state the way that it did. There had to be a large segment of your guys that wanted to get back

on the football field and play as soon as humanly possible. You know, we've gone on quite a bit of a run, and we were a little banged up. I think it was good for us having the time off. You know, you've got to approach it that way, because that's the way the schedule is anyway. So we took a little bit of time off. We practiced a couple days hard last week, and obviously we just pushed everything up a day. We You know, Sunday it was a Monday, Monday's a Tuesday, et cetera, leaving up to a Friday night game. So I think the bye weeks are good. You just, you know, need to understand you got a little bit of time off and then you've got to crank it back up when it's time to go to work.

You've got momentum on your side. The team you're playing against the Wildcats is not. They have not won in a long period of time. They got blown out by Central Florida the last time they took the football field. The one thing I noticed was that they're having a difficult. time rushing to football. So I would think that's, you know, you want to maintain that as one of the things for a key for victory for you this week is not letting their ground game become a difference

maker. No, you're exactly right. It's one of the keys to winning football games. I was looking at some stats the other day. You know, you want to turn over takeaway and the run battle, the teams that have done that Division I football won 92% of the ball games. So that stat is very, very important. We want to do a good job running the football

and do a super job and playing with leverage and tackling. Every week we want to try to make the opposing team be one dimensional. It was something we did a good job of in our last outing team that was averaging I believe over 220 yards a game rush and we held him to 82 yards.

And that was a big reason for the success that we had. So we've got to do that against Arizona as well. And lastly, I'm going to assume I don't know this for a fact, but quarterbacks that don't Don't throw any incompletions usually win their games too, right? I mean, is Zion going to do that for you again this week? I guess there hadn't been a quarterback who completed, you know, more than 10

than 100%. I don't think that's happened for a little while. And, yeah, he did a good job of it. You know, part of that, you know, limiting how many times you threw the balls, you know, it was raining pretty hard during the game. And we kind of found out that we were able to run it and doing a good job defensively. you know, wanted them to go to the big field. So every week it's a little bit different, you know, your path to victory.

And we'll have to see what that is, you know, on Friday night. Great visit, as always, coach. Safe Travels, Arizona. We'll talk again next weekend. Thanks for the time. And again, congratulations on the last couple victories. They've been a lot of fun to watch. Thank you, Matt.

You got it. You got it. That is the head football coach of our Houston Cougars, Willie Fritz, joining us, and he's brought to you by the Joint Chiropractic, the official chiropractor of University of Houston. athletics.