South Indiana

For a very, very long time there’s been a football coach hanging out at the lower levels who would draw universal praise across the game but never landed a top job.

His name is Willie Fritz.

He’s a 66-year-old coach who grew up playing in Kansas, then in college in Missouri. He got into coaching there after his playing career back in the 80s but ended up moving south to Texas to find more coaching opportunities, doing a second GA run at Sam Houston State before going into high school coaching (Willis, TX) and became a head coach for the first time at Blinn Junior College in the 90s. From there he went to Central Missouri before getting what you might call a break in the form of the Sam Houston State head coaching job in 2010.

He’s been a head coach ever since, hilariously always on the radar for poor Kansas who never hired him, and always in relative obscurity in the FCS or Sun Belt. Recently it was Houston who gave him his next break. Lowly Houston who routinely has its best players and assistants poached in the transfer portal by schools from within their own conference1.

He’s consistently been an effective coach who never quite broke out with the biggest accolades like an FCS Championship (lost the Final two years in a row) or playoff appearance (obviously hard at that level) and didn’t break out at Tulane until years seven and eight after going 2-10 in 2021.

But he took the Cougars from 4-8 before he got there to one more year at 4-8 and then 10-3 last year with a bowl game win over the LSU Tigers. Within the Big 12 they lost 35-11 to Texas Tech, 45-35 vs West Virginia, and 17-14 against TCU. They had a single player drafted (the tight end), retained much of the roster, and are now playing older and experienced starters at every single position in 2026.

It’s possible this new portal era is rewarding a different sort of coach than we might have assumed.