Willie Fritz Brings the Joy Back to UH Football — How Fritz and Defensive Guru Shiel Wood Have Made Houston’s Players Already Believe

Willie Fritz nearly went full Kelvin Sampson NCAA Tournament victory dance after his first win at the University of Houston. He jumped, broke into song and even did a flying leap, mosh pit style, into his celebrating players. The 64-year-old Fritz pumped both his fists into the air and screamed as his players held him up above their heads in the locker room.

This is a football coach who lets his joy out. One who’s already making the rather mishmashed group of returnees and transfer newcomers that make up Frtiz’s first UH team start to truly believe. Fritz and Shiel Wood, a 42-year-old defensive wizard who stepped away from coaching for three years to be a stay-at-home dad, have somehow already given the Cougars a real defensive identity just three games into a massive rebuild.

It’s potentially one of the better under the radar stories in college football, one that could gain momentum if Houston can open the Big 12 season with a road win over a beatable but very capable 2-1 Cincinnati team on Saturday afternoon, one that brings the best passing quarterback the Cougars have faced all season in Brendan Sorsby. Fritz is doing it by letting his emotions out, letting his players see how much this means to him. He’s letting the fans know to, dropping a letter of thanks to University of Houston supporters on Monday, a few days after that 33-7 wipeout of an overmatched Rice team.

Listen to Willie Fritz in a press conference, delivering measured answers to almost every question, rarely expanding greatly on anything, always staying calm, and it’s easy to peg him as some kind of college football Mister Rogers. But that misses the real man. The often fiery coach his players see.

“The energy he just brought into the locker room right there,” Houston linebacker Jalen Garner says. “We’re going to win every week. . . Mix of dancing, singing, yelling, jumping. . . Willie is pretty. . . He can get up there honestly.”

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Yes, Willie Fritz isn’t afraid to fly after a win. But he can be just as fired up when he sees something he doesn’t like.

“In practice,” Garner says when I ask him if he’s ever seen Fritz like that before. “But the opposite kind of emotion. When he gets mad at us.”

Fritz already seems to be building something at UH, something that centers around a defense that looks at opposing offenses the way a rottweiler looks at a fresh piece of meat. Something to devour. Rice quarterback E.J. Warner may come from quarterback royalty, but he gets no Arch Manning moments. Instead, UH’s swarming defense makes it look like the younger Warner is flinching at ghosts by the time he’s mercifully pulled in the fourth quarter of Houston’s 33-7 win.

It’s all part of Shiel Wood’s grand puppeteering. Keith Cooper Jr., Michael Batton, AJ. Haulcy, Carlos Allen and Jalen Garner are playing great for this UH defense. But Wood is putting them in position to make plays, making the game a little easier with his game plans. Fritz also credits Wood with how he installs his defenses, making sure the multiple concepts are really understood by the players.

“The plays that I made, I really credit them to Coach Wood,” Batton, who already has two sacks and 19 tackles through three games, says. “He put me in the right position and I just did my job. We blitz a lot and I like that. So we’re very aggressive. And we’re confident because we have the right guys on the field.

“Coach Wood knows how to put the right guys on the field. Some defensive coordinators have trouble with that. I’ve been around and I’ve seen it where they just don’t have the right guys on the field. You can scheme up whatever you want, but if you’ve got the best guys on the field, the scheme is going to work.

“He’s got trust in us guys. And we’ve got a lot of confidence in Coach Wood.”

For two straight weeks — against a Top 15 Oklahoma team and Rice — UH has looked like the best prepared team on the field. By a wide margin. When’s the last time you could say that about a University of Houston football team?

“Coach Wood has a great, great way of just highlighting and finding the different weaknesses of each and every team,” Garner says when I ask about these very different UH defensive game plans. “And honestly it works every week. Oklahoma, we had to do something different than what we did for Rice.”

UH’s New Defensive Mindset

It’s not so much that Willie Fritz did what Dana Holgorsen could not last season — beat Rice. It’s the way this Houston team absolutely sucked the life out of Rice, left the Owls more drained than an old man who has seen his life savings wiped out by a stripper. Rice does not break the 100 yards of total offense barrier until its very last drive of the game, after Fritz started pulling  the first teamers, conscious what a long season this is.

“The plays that I made, I really credit them to Coach Wood. He put me in the right position and I just did my job. We blitz a lot and I like that. So we’re very aggressive. And we’re confident because we have the right guys on the field.” — UH linebacker Michael Batton on defensive coordinator Shiel Wood

People on Married at First Sight are thinking clearer than the Rice offense is by the time Shiel Wood’s ferocious battlers are done with Warner and company. At the same time, UH finds its big play ability, using the speed left on its roster in ways that Holgorsen, a much more heralded offense mind, never seemed able to conjure up.

Running back Stacy Sneed super speeds his way to a 65-yard touchdown run. Receiver Stephon Johnson turns a short swing pass from quarterback Donovan Smith into a 44-yard romp down the sideline into the end zone, making one sharp cut and turning on the jets. Mehki Mews, the talented transfer from the Georgia juggernaut, returns a punt 75 yards for a touchdown. New starting running back Re’Shaun Sanford rips off a 34-yard run early to set the tone for a big play evening.

“I think we’re the best running back group in the nation,” Sneed says.

That’s more than a little farfetched. But that is how much Willie Fritz is making these guys believe. The UH players don’t see all the obvious holes in this roster, one patched together after the expected transfer portal exodus that greets any new coaching hire these days.

Instead, they’re starting to see themselves as giants. It doesn’t matter how anyone else sees them.

This is the power of Willie Fritz, of positive coaching where the joy is allowed to come out.

Tony Fitzpatrick, a defensive line guru who coached for 12 years at the University of Houston under four different head coaches, marvels at how Fritz does it. Building people up, rather than tearing them down.

“He’s just a good man,” Fitzpatrick tells PaperCity of Fritz. “He treats people with respect. His coaches coach with respect. They coach with energy. It is everybody’s moving. There’s no wasted space. There’s no wasted time. There’s no wasted motion. And if there is, you won’t be part of it. You’ll be left behind.”

Fitzpatrick, a former big-time college football player himself on the University of Miami’s first ever national championship team, believes the Fritz method of boosting up players is much more effective in creating a winning program that sticks.

“The guy he just took the place of,” Fitzpatrick says of Holgorsen. “It was belittling. It was demeaning. It was yelling. I mean football’s hard enough. Football’s hard enough. Football’s a job too because if these guys aren’t playing (college) football, they’d be out working somewhere. So it’s part job, part fun and part grueling because it’s hard on your body.

“But this guy is positive. . . I don’t think he’ll change one bit. . . What they’re doing around there, the end zone (new football operations center) facility, the excitement, I’d be shocked if they didn’t win a whole bunch of football games.”

“He treats people with respect. His coaches coach with respect. They coach with energy. It is everybody’s moving. There’s no wasted space. There’s no wasted time. There’s no wasted motion. And if there is, you won’t be part of it. You’ll be left behind.” — former college football star and longtime coach Tony Fitzpatrick on Willie Fritz

Willie Fritz certainly isn’t taking anything for granted. His positive coaching includes helping teach guys how to be a good teammate.

“We practice being a good teammate,” Fritz says in his weekly Monday press conference, which is shown live on ESPN+. “Part of that is dabbing each other up and saying an encouraging word to each person out there. And I think it’s under taught.

“Nowadays, it’s ‘How can I dog the opponent?” rather than ‘How can I pump the tires of my teammate?’ I don’t know where we got lost on that. But somewhere we did. So we want to pump our teammates’ tires and be a good teammate.”

Under Fritz, UH even has a Friday night Missions Coogs ritual where a player is highlighted and all the other players in the room say something good about that player in front of the entire group.

Building the joy happens even before any flying postgame leaps. This is University of Houston football under Willie Fritz.