Inside Wes and Willie Fritz’s Next Level Houston Roster Building — How a Young Son’s Never-Ending Questions Grew Into a Rising College Football Power

Wes Fritz always found football rosters and how teams are put together fascinating. As a kid, he knew every player on his dad’s teams and he’d want to know why Willie Fritz picked each one of them. “It would just be him coming home from work and me just bugging the ever living hell out of him with every single question about his teams,” Wes laughs. “Since I can remember. . .

“I’m sure when he got home, the last thing he wanted to do was talk about his roster to a kid who was seven or eight years old. But he made time for me and all that. Always listened to all my questions.”

Neither Willie Fritz or his son Wes knew it then of course, but you can trace University of Houston football’s dramatic rise back to those moments between a patient father and his eager son. Willie Fritz continued to coach at bigger and bigger schools and Wes Fritz became his general manager and chief roster builder at Houston, a job that did not even exist in college football when a young Wes peppered his dad with questions about his teams.

Willie and Wes Fritz’s approach to putting a team together, their shared obsession with getting it right, is as big a reason as any that UH is 6-1, ranked 14th in the country and set to be featured on ESPN’s College GameDay with the Cougars playing at No. 10 Utah Saturday night (9:15 pm, ESPN) in one of the biggest games of the college football season so far. This Houston program has become one of the very best in the country at using the transfer portal, with high impact hit after high impact hit.

This past offseason alone that haul included Anthony Boswell, the 6-foot-2, 301-pounder from Toledo who Wes Fritz calls “the best center in college football.” (Many objective observers agree with that assessment with Boswell named the First Team center on the AP Midseason All-American Team.) Two other elite offensive lineman — left guard Shadre Hurst (another Midseason First Team All-American) and right tackle Drew Terrill also came in the portal. As did the Cougars leading rusher (running back Makhi Hughes), starting tight end Patrick Overmyer (seven touchdowns) and starting wide receiver Trent Walker (seven catches for 104 yards and a touchdown in that 35-32 win over Oklahoma State). On defense, the transfer portal class includes pass rushing creator Ashton Porter, starting cornerback Jalen Mayo, starting safety/linebacker hybrid Javion White, starting nose tackle De’Marion Thomas (currently injured) and regular starting linebacker Jaden Yates (also injured right now).

That doesn’t even include transformative quarterback Conner Weigman, who came in the 2025 portal class after Texas A&M benched and discarded him, and helped change everything.

These transfers are all talented. But they’ve also all been vouched for, all been deemed Willie Fritz Guys.

“It would just be him coming home from work and me just bugging the ever living hell out of him with every single question about his teams. Since I can remember. . . I’m sure when he got home, the last thing he wanted to do was talk about his roster to a kid who was seven or eight years old. But he made time for me and all that. Always listened to all my questions.” — UH general manager Wes Fritz 

Wes Fritz calls it cross checking, and it’s at heart of this University of Houston football transformation. It’s not just about identifying how good of a football player a potential transfer portal target is. It’s about finding out what kind of person they are, about how they’d fit into a team coached by his dad.

“We are very careful with who we bring in,” Wes Fritz tells PaperCity. “As a player obviously first and foremost. But as a person too. I think we do a really good job of that. Cross checking, talking to multiple sources. Just until we are certain that we’re not bringing in a guy that’s going to be a problem.”

Willie Fritz is as emphatic about not bringing problems onto his roster as UH basketball coach Kelvin Sampson is. But UH football’s roster building strategy also centers around finding players who are hungry, often players at schools outside of the Power 4 conferences who feel they have something to prove.

“We really like to target Group of 5 FCS guys in the portal,” Wes Fritz says. “We led the country last year in most Group of 5 guys being selected all-conference that transferred in. So I think those guys that come in with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder. They want to prove themselves. Very appreciative of everything. There’s no ego.

“I think that’s kind of our recipe.”

The Fritzes also target intelligent players who they think can understand the schemes offensive coordinator Slade Nagle and defensive coordinator Austin Armstrong want to run and adapt to the changes this forward-thinking program is liable to make throughout a season. Willie Fritz also has one simple test he likes to throw at potential additions.

“I always ask kids, ‘Hey, do you like football?’ ” Willie Fritz says. “I want their answer to be, ‘No Coach, I love it.’ Because at this level if you don’t love it, it’s tough to be successful.”

Wes Fritz, the Making Of a College Football GM

Willie Fritz remembers when he first started to realize just what an obsession for football and a knack for the numbers his son had. “This was in the summer of ’96,” Willie Fritz tells PaperCity. “So we’re getting ready to go into the ’96 season at Blinn (the junior college in Brenham that Willie Fritz turned into a national champion). And I get somebody call me, it’s like July, and they’re going to do an article on our team.

“So the guy had a deadline and he said, ‘Hey Coach, do you remember the scores of your games?’ And I was at my house. And I was like, ‘God, I can’t remember.’ I know we played Tyler first. I don’t remember the exact score. And Wes calls out, ’37 to 14.’ And I started going through them all and he was right on every one of them. He was 12 for 12.”

Wes Fritz was 6 years old at the time.

Willie Fritz laughs as we stand in one of the shiny and still spotless hallways of the year-plus-old Memorial Hermann Football Operations Center Talk about foreshadowing.

Houston’s head coach may be a 66-year-old coaching lifer, but Willie Fritz is not caught up in doing it old school. He embraces football analytics almost as much as Wes Fritz does. Willie is the one who first urged his son to check out Moneyball, the dive into how the Oakland A’s under general manager Billy Beane used sabermetrics to give the low payroll A’s an edge before many of big money teams caught on.

“We just don’t have all the resources here financially,” Willie Fritz tells PaperCity. “We just don’t. We can cry about it or we can be smart with what we do. . . We have to be smart with how we do stuff and (Wes) has done a really job of that. We just don’t have the ability to make mistakes.”

When UH football spends money in the transfer portal, it needs to hit. Programs with larger budgets can swing and miss — and still afford to make up for those mistakes with more spending. Wes Fritz’s hit rate is becoming one of the lifebloods of this Houston program.

“Now the only who overrules him is me,” Willie Fritz tells PaperCity. “And I don’t do that very often.”

For the guy who used to relentless quiz his dad about his rosters, being a college football general manager is his dream job. It did not start out that way of course. College football GMs were not even a thing when Wes Fritz was coming up. Scouting and getting into an NFL personnel office seemed like the only pathway. But with the Name, Image and Likeness and officially sanctioned player compensation roaring into view, a good GM in college football suddenly became almost invaluable.

“This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” Wes Fritz says. “I always wanted to be involved in the player evaluation aspect of it.”

Wes Fritz credits his dad’s willingness to always be open, to always answer his questions and never become one of those coaches who comes home and broods, cut off from his family even when he’s physical present, with helping get him there.

“I was always welcome,” Wes says. “My friends were always welcome. Some of my friends, like to this day, some of their best memories are like traveling with the team and going to games. Being on the sideline. Like it’s honestly awesome to be able to work alongside him.

“It means a lot more because you’re working for your dad and family.”

Wes Fritz knows what Willie Fritz wants in a football player better than anyone. This is how you end up finding the best center in college football at Toledo. If Scott Hatteberg is the quintessential Billy Beane Moneyball player, Boswell may represent close to the perfect Fritz Find. Considered undersized coming out of high school, Boswell walked on at Purdue, but never got a chance to play at the Big Ten school before jumping to the MAC last season.

“The guys we’re brought in are all hungry,” Eman Naghavi says. “They want to prove themselves.”

“It starts with us,” Boswell says. “. . . We don’t put in all this work for nothing.”

It starts with those Fritz evaluations, those background checks, the diving deep into the numbers. This is how you bring a college football program back to roaring life. Wes Fritz has never stopped asking questions — and Houston sure likes the answers.