The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Head Coach Willie Fritz Joins Ahead of Their Match Up vs UCF

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Head Coach Willie Fritz Joins Ahead of Their Match Up vs UCF

132 on the Matt Thomas show with Rossum here in Memphis for Rockets and Grizzlies tonight. Let's go back to Houston for a few minutes and say hi to the head football coach of our Houston Cougars. Willie Fritz and is presented to you by the Joint Chiropractic, the official chiropractor of a Houston Cougar athletics. Coach, I always like to ask you about the film study with the kids after a loss, disappointing against West Virginia. What was that like? How long did you look at it? and how long did you hit the erase file after breaking down that game against the mountaineers? Well, we're playing this Friday, so we had a little bit of a different week,

kicked everything up a day. And we came in on Sunday, and we watched the tape. We didn't get through all of it, but we wanted to move on ahead to Central Florida our opponent this Friday. But we wanted to look at some of the mistakes we made and, you know, kind of put it to bed. You know, sometimes people when they have a tough game that is don't. really address it. We want to make sure we addressed it. Don't do that again. That's way too many turnovers. Minus four turnover takeaway margin and on your minus four, you have a tough time winning the game. On the turnover front, trying to make things happen,

carelessness, a little bit of both. Do you dissect turnovers as all turnovers being equal or do you go, all right, I see what you were trying to do there, but unfortunately, things in that work out to our advantage? Sometimes that, hey, it just happens. You know, there was a, oh, we threw a go ball to Harvey and, you know, the ball got kicked up in the air. It came over and got an interception on it. You know, the part of it was, what was tough was, you know, we didn't make the tackle on it. And I got getting about another 20, 25 yards on the play.

But, you know, we feel like no turnover is a good turnover. We just want to stay even as much as possible. And, you know, all the games we've won this year, We've been evener plus. Two games we've lost. We've been minus my career as head coach. I've got one 91% of games, and we've been plus one or better. So it's a pretty good barometer on your success in the team.

I've had a chance to talk to a couple of your Dean lineman. I'm sure they were very disappointed with the run defense against some mountaineers as well, correct? Yeah, they ran the ball well against us. They really did. Missed some tackles, but they had a few plays. We just didn't fit up, right? some plays out on the perimeter and did a good job and keep going back to it before until we got it fixed.

We're going to have to play a lot better against the run this weekend. Central Florida's got a couple good backs. You can play with good leverage, you know, do a good job of tackling. If you play leverage, you know, they might get a play on you here or there, but it's not going to be a big one. And that's what happened to us last Saturday. I had a few big ones. You mentioned the short week.

So what gets, does everything get sped up? Is there something that gets omitted, or is it just a case of just less recovery time? Yeah, a little less recovery time. We came in on Sunday. We actually did a team yoga with everybody after we watched the film. You know, and then Monday it was kind of like a Tuesday. Tuesday was kind of like Wednesday, et cetera, going through the week. You know, you want to be careful not to do too much, you know.

As a younger head coach, we try to fit it all in and, you know, a shorter amount of time. and sometimes they've done a lot of guys to recover and be fresh and friskeys and want them to be on game day. So there's some of the important things we wanted to get done. Our big work day was yesterday. We had a good workout this morning and then tomorrow will be like a regular day before ball game

where we basically, you know, basically, you know, it's kind of a jog through, walk through, all the different things. And then we do a lot of meeting the day before the game. So we don't want to get too much of a different schedule. You mentioned Willie yoga. When did you incorporate that into your program? Was that from a strength and conditioning coach? Was that from somebody that you used to work with?

And how do the kids, how do 18 and 19-year-olds embrace yoga in 2025? They kind of like it. You know, and we'll do it as, you know, we're going to be flying to the game tomorrow. It's going to be a couple-hour flight. When we get off the plane, we get to the hotel, that's the first thing we'll do. Put our bags in the room. and everybody will get in this big ballroom and we'll do a yoga.

About 20, 30 minutes into it, you can hear some guys snoring. You know, get some relaxed a little bit. But, you know, we kind of did a little bit different on Sunday. It's more to speed up the recovery process. There's some different things that our strength coaches did with it. And, you know, guys felt like they felt better on Monday when we came out and had to practice. I'm curious. Do the 300-pound linemen like the yoga, too, or is that more than the skill position players embrace it?

They enjoy it. They really do. You know, Coach Haster talked about a lot. He went and got certified, and he does the same thing for all of them. You know, he and strength coaches. We've got a couple of them that are certified doing it for us. And, you know, the big guys, they seem to enjoy it just as much as the smaller guys do. And I think it's good for us to incorporate with the whole team.

Some of the coaches even jump in there and get into it as well. Are you doing it yourself? No, I am not. I had to ask. You know that, right? I had to ask those things. Hey, I understand. The UCF Knights only scored three points against Florida.

Turn the ball over. Punned a lot. I mean, basically, that's good tape for your kids to look at saying, hey, we show up like we normally do defensively. We can stop this UCF offense. Yeah, they kind of ended off week, kind of like we had an off week. The week before, they played West Virginia got after the big time. So, you know, I don't think that's indicative of their season so far. They've had a tough schedule early in the season.

I guess week three, they got after North Carolina. Pretty good. You know, just a team that doesn't make a whole lot of mistakes, but just like us last week, they made a lot of mistakes against Baylor. So offense, defense, kicking game, They haven't given up much many points defensively. Offensively, they do a good job running the ball. We've got to prove that we fixed what was broken last week.

And we've got a couple really good return guys. So we're going to have to do a nice job with our coverage units. You've had to be overall very pleased with your special teams group in 2025, correct? There's been some good stuff. You know, Ethan Sanchez, 16 to 19 on field goals, which is excellent. We've done a good, solid job and kickoff and punt. coverage. You know, we're still looking for that, you know, big return,

whether it's part return or kick return. We've had a couple blocks. We've done a nice job with. So I think, you know, we look at this deal called pro football focus, PFF, and they rank everybody. I think we're second or third out of 16 teams right now. But we still feel like we can really improve in the return part of the game. Lastly, coach, look, you got to,

week off after this, then you got the TCU Baylor to close out the regular season. And the bowl situation will settle itself. But I would think, and not that you need must wins at any point, but to have this game for you against this UCF team, get on the road, your last legitimate plane flip trip, getting out there to get the victory would be a great way for these guys to kind of segue into the final two weeks of the season. Yeah, well, it would be a great way to go into the by week. You know, all of them are must wins for us. We've always felt that way. You know, It's going to be a big time challenge. They're a good ball club.

We got to, between both of us, it's going to kind of see who rebounds first. We want to start good. I don't think we have started good, you know, for three or four of the law. You know, we did one game against our Arizona State, but some other weeks we did not start very good. So we want to really do a great job in the first quarter.

We've been working on our openers. And, you know, we really start the game off with a bang. Willie, thank you for the time. As always, safe travels to Central Florida, and we'll talk again in a couple weeks, hopefully celebrating a victory against UCF. Thanks for the time. You bet you.

Thank you. Go, Coogs.