Willie Fritz can no longer yell. His voice is gruff and gravelly from years of “shouting encouragement” to his players, as he puts it. Put a stranger in a blindfold, play a recording of Fritz talking, and they could guess what he does for a living. He sounds like what he is – a football coach. 

But Fritz is easy to hear over the booming music played at college football practices. Fritz attended a Kansas City Chiefs practice back in the early 1980s and watched Frank Gansz Sr. coach special teams. Forty years later, the memorable part of that practice wasn’t any drills or fundamentals. It was how Gansz coached. Specifically, how Gansz broadcasted his “encouragement” into a microphone that was attached to speakers. 

“I thought, ‘oh boy, that is genius,” Fritz said at Big 12 media days in Frisco last week. He loved the idea of a more efficient way to correct players from a distance without losing any more of his fading voice. “Back then, I was coaching everybody at every position. I didn’t have all these assistant coaches I have now.”  

As can everyone else in Third Ward. That’s because Fritz did what he does best: take good ideas and improve them. His first iteration was a microphone attached to a speaker like a makeshift karaoke machine. Now, he uses a megaphone that blares through the speakers at practice. 

“My players get a kick out of it because I’ll see something from across the field and be able to yell encouragement,” Fritz said. “It’s not a bad thing for the players to know that the head coach can see it all.” 

Fritz didn’t need a loud voice or a megaphone to deliver his message at Big 12 media days. His Cougars went 4-8 in his first year at Houston and the Cougars’ win projected total in the desert is 6.5. The Big 12 axed media polls, but if one was done, Houston would’ve been in the 10 to 16 range on most ballots.

That’s allowed Houston to fly under the radar, even in Texas. Texas Tech spent big in the transfer portal and gobbled up headlines. Baylor gained steam throughout the offseason as a Big 12 favorite thanks to Sawyer Robertson and an improving defense. TCU won six of their last seven in 2024 and return the starting quarterback and both coordinators from that team. 

Houston is almost starting over in Year 2 of the Fritz era. Fritz hired two new play callers after firing offensive coordinator Kevin Barbay and losing defensive coordinator Shiel Wood to a big payday in Lubbock. His Cougars also signed 30 new transfers, including eight or nine new potential starters on offense and a handful on defense. 

“We’ve got depth. Last year, we didn’t have that at all,” Fritz said about his improved roster. “Now, we have competitions for positions. First two, three games we’ll need to figure out who is playing, who is starting, how much they are going to play.” 

Fritz is familiar with building programs into championship contenders. He’s done it at every level from Blinn Junior College to Central Missouri to Sam Houston to Georgia Southern to Tulane. He led all five of those teams to conference championships. He won two national championships at Blinn and played for two more at Sam Houston. His teams won a conference championship or played for one by Year 3 in his three previous stops. 

In short, Fritz knows what success looks like. But he also knows that it isn’t up to him to measure it. 

“You measure it in wins,” Fritz said of how to judge success inside a program. “I feel like we’re better and we’ll find out by how much.”