Willie Fritz began his coaching career more than four decades ago at Pittsburg State, an NCAA Division II school tucked into the southeast corner of Kansas where he had played defensive back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Over time, the current Houston coach has seen just about everything in college football, whether it be as the head man at the junior college level (Blinn), the D-II level (Central Missouri), Division I’s lower-tier Football Championship Subdivision (Sam Houston State), lower-level Group of Five conference programs in the upper-tier Football Bowl Subdivision (Georgia Southern and Tulane) or now at the Power Four conference level with the Cougars.
Yes, his team is off to a brilliant 3-0 start. And yes, it is too early to start selling tickets to the Big 12 title game.
“I tell the team all the time, this only counts as one game,” Fritz said after last weekend’s win over Colorado and with an open date ahead this week. “Fortunately, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and by the time I wake up tomorrow, I’ll be on to the next one. I told the guys to make sure they celebrate for a couple of days and have fun with their families, but we’ve got to move on.”
Yet it’s worth pausing to consider this: Houston, Arizona, UCF and Utah were all Big 12 bottom-dwellers last season, fodder for the programs that were in a logjam at the top of the conference.