Speaker 1: One thirty three on The Matt Thomas Show. At Ross
Houston Cougar is knocking off Arizona to secure a six
and one start of the season a Bowl eligibility. That's
awesome news for the head coach of the Houston Cougar's
Willie Fritz, joining us in the courtesy of our friends
the Joint Chiropractic, the official chiropractor of the Houston Cougars.
First of all, Wellie, I love the shirt you wore
at the postgame get together. Bull Bound is cool, but
it felt like the kids, to a man after the game,
said they had got more to accomplishes that since you
got from the guys after the win on Saturday.
Speaker 2: You bet you that's you know, that's always one of
your goals, you know that playing a bowl game. I
played a bunch of them. I've been lucky fortunate to
do that, and they're all good ones, every single one
of them. But uh yeah, there's a lot of a
lot of other things to accomplish his season, and I
just wanted to make sure we put it out there
and let the kids know about it. Obviously, other people
we're gonna talk talk to him about and tell them
that and we are Bowl eligible, and there are very
many teams in the country that are Bowl eligible right now,
so we're proud of that, but we sure do want
to accomplish a lot more than that.
Speaker 1: You know, welly, there's so many folks that will criticize
final two minutes use of timeouts, even the best coaches
in the country. I thought, what your squad did in
the execution in the final two against Arizona's perfection. How
much do you work on that, and even if you
do a lot during the course of the week, is
there just something different about having to try to run
a two minute in a game and a tight game
as compared to doing it on a raindo practice day.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we just did it practice this morning.
Did a little bit HANDI game situation. I think had
thirty seven seconds. They had the ball of the minus
forty eight one time out on each side. We do
a lot of it sometimes with seven on seven where
we just use the linebackers, the defensive backs, the wide receivers,
tight ends, running backs, quarterbacks. You know, we have guys
that can play the part of officials, and you know,
we have it up on the stadium scoreboard, so you
work on it a ton, but that one was a
little different because you went, you know, kind of from
a four minute situation. We're trying to run the clock
into a two minute situation. And that's why it's so
valuable to be able to save your timeouts. We'd had
to blow one earlier that half, you know, and you
always want to have three if if possible, but we
had two of them. We had plenty of time on
the drive. I thought, Uh, Coach Nangel did a good
job of tempo, going slow, and then I had to
go a little bit faster at times there at the end.
You know, we had some timeouts in our back pocket
to be able to you know, kind of get the
clock down to where we wanted it, where it was
either going to be a make and we win or
you know, they don't have an opportunity to answer and
less silvertime. So kids did a good job, they kept
their composure and uh, you know, everybody did a very
nice job with it.
Speaker 1: Do you talk to kickers in your life when plays
like that come up where they got to go win
it or do you try to leave them alone?
Speaker 2: I really pretty much leave them alone. We do a
whole bunch of it. In practice, we do what we
call a clock field goal. You know we did that
on Tuesday, where we get done with stretch, we all
get together and boom, we just go pack the ball.
We'll do it tomorrow during our script we'll do we
call a whistle field goal or officials are looking at
a replay, we can actually stamp the ball in the
whistle and kick the ball. And then we got some
other times I'll have guys staying around the kicker and
kind of egg him out a little bit, put a
little pressure on him and stuff. And you know, our guy, really,
you know, does a super job of not worrying about
any of that stuff. Ethan, Sayan Chaz and you know
he's done a good guys who I had two game
winners for us so far this season.
Speaker 1: I've asked you this before in the past, but it's
worthy again because Ethan has been such a big part
of his team.
Speaker 2: Are you.
Speaker 1: I don't know what scholarship situations are, and you've obviously
got some money that now schools can pay. But the
kicker role to me, with so many kickers making such
a big difference, not only making kicks will he but
kicking them fifty to fifty five yards and maybe ten
or fifteen years ago, you weren't trying always seeing collectively
coaches putting more of a priority in recruiting in that
particular position.
Speaker 2: Well, we always have. I've always had a you know,
a kicker, snapper, and a punter on scholarship, and one
time I was one of the few guys that did that.
They'd always try to get people, try to get walk
on us to come in and do that. But we
want to have a quality person because they can I
can help you win games. You know, a snapper, Jacob
Garza is our snapper, does an excellent job. You know,
on that particular play, you have to have an accurate snap.
You got to have great protection with the guards, the tackles,
the tight ends, the wings. And then he Jake Sock
is our holder and he does a super job holding.
And you know, if you got a good snap, you
got a good hold. You know, now the kicker's got
an opportunity to have a great kick. So it's the
whole operation obviously. Everything. It's kind of like I talk
about with the quarterback. Right, you know, things are going good,
corter that gets too much credit, things aren't going so good.
They get too much play the same thing with the kicker.
In those situations, there's a there's an operation that's got
to be smooth, and all those guys do a fabulous job.
Speaker 1: I know, Boogie Johnson's injury status is not what you
want to report or have talked about this week, But
collectively as a group, how is that room depth wise
and how do you feel right now at the midway
point of this season in terms of your overall depth
on both offense and defense.
Speaker 2: Well, Stefan Johnson's had a great career here and hopefully
we'll be able to get him to keep keep playing
here at the University of Houston. Boogie Johnson obviously, and
you know, Bud, we've got a little bit of depth
there and we need it, you know, Harvey Bursar, let's
come on over the last couple of weeks, and Mari
Thomas is playing extremely well, Kobe Young doing a good job,
mckaimws Jaquith Martin, true freshman that's playing a bunch for us.
You know, they had the ability to throw the ball
in the backs coming out of the backfield. We've got
some good tight ends. You know, Tanners played extremely well
for us and Antreville Frederick and you know, so we've
It's one of the things this is a tough, you know, sport,
and you've got to make sure you have depth. As
one of the thanks coming in the season I was
excited about is that we had more depth and certainly
what we had last season.
Speaker 1: Lastly, Willie was nice to get the game over with
at a good amount of time and got to go
home and watch the Arizona State game. Let's talk a
little bit about Sam Lovett. First of all, great quarterback
has been there a couple of years. Some fourth down
throws he made late in that game, helping them pull
off the win. Last week, you're going from one great
quarterback and defeated another one here this time on the
road in Tempe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a really, really good quarterback. He's a little
similar to the kid last week. You know, he's a
bigger guy obviously, but a really strong arm. Can make
all the throws and then you know he is going
to run downhill. He's going to go up with the
intention of tackling because sometimes he'll try to load it
the shoulder, run you over, and he's he's great in
in the pocket, extending place. Uh, so you know, he's
one of the top quarterbacks in America, so we've got
to do a good job of trying to limit his effectiveness.
Speaker 1: Thanks for the time, has always congratulations, it's so fun
to see the big victory, the way things turned out,
and uh, we'll surprise some folks and tempting this weekend.
Speaker 2: What do you say sounds great? Go Kook's