HOUSTON, TX – Willie Fritz’s former players love to tell the war stories. 

Michael Bishop was Fritz’s first star. He chose Blinn Junior College ahead of the 1995 season over professional baseball and opportunities to play football at a four-year university because his dream was to play quarterback. Fritz gave him that opportunity and helped turn him into the player the nation fell in love with at Kansas State under Bill Snyder. 

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t hiccups. Bishop’s roommate was wide receiver Quincy Morgan, who was struggling early in the 1995 season and was contemplating quitting the team and moving back home to Dallas. One of the rules at Blinn under Fritz was that each person was responsible for their roommate. If one of you missed practice or film or the weight room, both were punished. 

Bishop ignored that rule. He was a young player who was more worried about getting to the breakfast check on time than he was about Morgan. So, when Morgan missed the meal, Bishop joined in the punishment. That meant a 5:30 a.m. “Fun Run” where Bishop and Morgan ran every bleacher in the stadium before running the track and finishing with up-downs every five yards and barrel rolls the length of the field. 

“It was brutal,” Bishop said. “Back then, Coach Fritz didn’t mind turning his hat backwards or putting on a helmet to jump into a drill and going full speed. We gravitated to it because we had a coach who’d jump into the fire with us.” 

Fritz says the stories about him wearing a helmet and practicing with the boys at Blinn are exaggerated, but he vividly remembers the fun runs while at Blinn. If one kid missed class, he’d run the whole team at 6 a.m. One of those mornings, Fritz was running his team and using some colorful language when he spotted Blinn Junior College president Donald Voelter and his wife walking the track through the fog of a January morning. 

“I was like, ‘oh, shit. I’m getting fired,’” Fritz laughed. “I didn’t know what I was going to tell my wife because I was on a day-to-day contract, at-will employment. He told me to come over to him and I thought he was going to chew my butt. He said, ‘good job’ and I knew I was in the right place.” 

Fritz and Bishop were a combined 24-0 with two JUCO national championships in 1995 and 1996. That helped Bishop get a full ride to Kansas State, where he helped Bill Snyder and the Wildcats reach new heights. And it helped Fritz land the Central Missouri job ahead of the 1997 season. He stayed there for 13 seasons before taking over as head coach at Sam Houston State, where he had been an assistant under Ron Randleman in 1991 and 1992. 

One of Fritz’s first calls when he took over at Sam Houston was to China Spring quarterback Brian Bell a few weeks before signing day. Bell had three offers – Southeastern Louisiana, Central Arkansas, and Ohio – and was trying to pick between those programs when Fritz asked him to take a visit to Huntsville and become a Bearkat. So Bell, his dad, Mark, who was the head football coach at China Spring, and his older brother, Shawn, was a star quarterback at Baylor and was then the head coach at Clifton High School, jumped in the car the next day and drove to Sam Houston. 

One of the donors let Fritz borrow his car and he used it to drive the Bells around campus, showing off the dorms, the academic buildings, and the athletic facilities. When the visit was over and the family was headed back to China Spring, Brian turned to his dad and said, “this is where I want to play. I want to play for this guy.” 

It was a great decision. Bell was a four-year starter for the Bearkats, leaving Sam Houston as the program’s all-time winningest quarterback with 39 victories in 53 starts. He threw for 8,655 yards and accounted for 107 total touchdowns. 

But like Bishop, Bell had to learn some exhausting lessons under Fritz’s tutelage. A player who makes a mistake like showing up late for practice or skipping an offseason workout made what Fritz called “The List.” Fritz likes to brag on his former players who never made that list, but Bell isn’t one of them. 

He overslept for a walkthrough one time and showed up late. The punishment was a 5 a.m. bleacher run at Bowers Stadium. But the part that stood out to Bell at the time and sticks with him to this day is that Fritz didn’t send a GA or a position coach to lead the Fun Runs. Fritz not only showed up, but he also ran the stairs, too. 

“You fear him a bit as a player or an assistant because you’re not sure when it is your turn, (to get it)” Bell joked. “He’ll still put you on the list.” 

Bishop and Bell chuckle when asked if Fritz has toned it down as he’s gotten older. The irony of Fritz, and maybe the magic, is that he is equal parts hard ass and cheerleader. He says one doesn’t do any good without the other. 

Ask a former player about Fritz and they love to talk about the hard stuff – the ass chewings, the punishments, the physical practices that were three-a-days back at Blinn and Sam Houston. 

But they keep coming back. Both Bell and Bishop are on Fritz’s current staff at Houston. Attend any Fritz game or practice over the last 30-plus years and at least one former player or assistant coach is on the sideline. A lot of them are now coaches themselves, and Fritz regularly makes time to talk to their teams through Zoom calls. 

“The outside world sees him as Coach Fritz, but a lot of us who played for him see him not only as a coach, but as a father,” Bishop explained. “Somebody you can depend on, somebody that’s going to hold you accountable, somebody that wants you to be the best you can be every single day. You don’t find that in every locker room at every university.” 

Success has followed Fritz wherever he goes and those closest to him pin the on-field consistency to his consistency as a person. He’s never too up or too down. He sets an alarm every day but never uses it. He runs around the field after practice and averaged close to 20,000 steps a day. 

Fritz, 66, is now in his 34th year as a head coach. He’s only had six losing seasons, and three of those were in his first year at a program. He’s 34-33-1 in Year 1 at six different stops. He’s 189-94 in the other 27 seasons. He’s 39-14 in Year 3, including a 2-0 start at Houston ahead of its primetime matchup with Texas Tech on Friday night. 

Fritz is a football coach’s football coach. He openly calls himself boring. Even his grandsons call him “coach” because that’s what everyone else calls him. He said that at the Big 12 basketball tournament last year in Kansas City, he sat in the first row and watched Kelvin Sampson coach more than he watched the game. He spent his birthday two years ago watching his sister-in-law coach the McDonald’s All-American game. 

Football and family, it is what Fritz does. His assistants at Tulane would beg Randleman, Fritz’s head coach at Pittsburg State and one of his real mentors, to get Fritz a hobby so he’d be out of the football offices on occasion. No such luck. 

“He always says he doesn’t have any hobbies, but I think his hobbies are being a good father and grandfather,” Wes Fritz said. He’s Willie’s son and general manager. “He sucks at fishing. He doesn’t golf. So, there isn’t much else he does.”

And that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Fritz was born into a sports-crazed environment. His dad, Harry, was the head coach at Central Missouri in 1952 and later worked as the executive director of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). Willie was one of seven children and each of them earned an athletic scholarship in college. 

One of his older brothers, Ed, is a wildly successful high school basketball coach in Kansas. Ed was a senior when Fritz was a freshman. He said that his little brother was the fastest kid in the school growing up. One summer, on a whim, Ed says that a 10-year-old Fritz entered the Illinois state swim meet while visiting family and finished third in the butterfly. 

If Ed ran for two touchdowns one week, his little brother would go for 250 yards the next week. One time the family was in Kentucky visiting relatives and it took Ed three hours to work up the courage to do a one-and-a-half off the high dive before he finally did it. Before he could celebrate himself, his younger brother did a double off the same high dive without giving it much thought. 

But his favorite memory of his younger brother came when Ed was in the ninth grade. Ed was playing middle linebacker in a game while his dad and Fritz were in the stands watching. Ed, who was admittedly small in high school, was run over by a couple of players on the same play. When he got up and looked into the stands, his dad looked disgusted. His kid brother had a different reaction. 

“Willie seemed very happy about it,” Ed said. 

Fritz isn’t as mischievous as he was as a kid. He’s matured from the defensive back at Pittsburg State who famously fashioned his hair into a mohawk for picture day. And he’s evolved with the times and isn’t the self-described hard ass that he was in his early days. 

But go to a Houston practice and the fire remains evident. He’s yelled so much throughout his career that he now uses a bullhorn or a microphone to provide his players with “encouragement” – as he calls it with a wry smile. Probably that same smile Ed witnessed after getting run over almost 60 years ago. 

Fritz has won at every level of college football. He was 39-5-1 in the JUCO ranks. He was 97-47 at Central Missouri and took Sam Houston to two FCS national championship games in four years at Sam Houston. At Georgia Southern, he led the Eagles to a Sun Belt Conference championship in their first year as an FBS program and then took over a Tulane program in the dumpster and was 23-4 over his last two seasons in New Orleans. 

Fritz came to Houston to conquer the final horizon of his college football career. He’d won everywhere except at the Power Four and wanted a new challenge. He found it with the Cougars and is 12-3 since the start of 2025. 

But go to your favorite local sports bar and ask them to list the 10 best college coaches in America. Hell, ask them to list the five best FBS coaches in Texas. Only the true ball knowers will list Fritz. That’s because he’s taken the path less traveled. He didn’t work his way up the ranks as a hot-shot coordinator at big schools, he went the JUCO route to become a young head coach and has climbed the ladder since. 

Friday night gives him a chance to show the nation why he’s so well-respected within the profession. Houston won 10 games last season and the Cougars are a dark horse candidate to win the Big 12 in 2026, Fritz’s third in charge. They’ll become one of the co-favorites with a win over Texas Tech in Lubbock. 

Fritz doesn’t care, to be clear. Back to his consistency, Fritz says coaching against USC in the Cotton Bowl with Tulane was no different than facing Cisco while he was at Blinn. It is the process that counts. But the people around Fritz hope that the college football world realizes what they have before it’s too late. 

“I think it is a shame that he doesn’t get the flowers that he should,” Bishop said. “He could win the Big 12 and a national title and still not get his credit because he’s not playing the media game like that. But we know. The people in this building know that he’s one of the best to ever do it.”