If there is a coach who can make adjustments after an ugly loss, it’s coach Willie Fritz, who is in his second year with the Houston program and knows his players better than anyone.
The Texas Tech Red Raiders got the best of the Houston Cougars last Saturday night in primetime at TDECU Stadium in front of a sold-out crowd.
“I want to tell the student body and all the fans of the University of Houston, outstanding job coming out to the ball game,” Fritz said. “Great crowd. Unfortunately, we didn’t play as well as what we needed to. Texas Tech is very well coached and very talented football team and we knew in order to beat them, we were going to need to play great and I don’t think we brought our A game. I gotta do a better job of getting our guys prepared.”
UH quarterback Conner Weigman (1) and UH quarterback Zeon Chriss (2) / Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer
Flip the script and move one.
That’s the message that Fritz is echoing inside the locker room after the first Big 12 conference loss of the season.
“We talked about flushing it down the toilet and moving on,” Fritz said. “I thought we had a great practice.”
After losing quarterback Conner Weigman in the second quarter, the offense stalled on most of its drives, but there was a sign pointing in the right direction for the star athlete from Cypress, Texas.
“Conner Weigman is in concussion protocol but is doing pretty darn well,” Fritz said. “He’ll work back in tomorrow and the next day and should be full speed to protocol for the process they go through. We are looking forward to him playing for us on Saturday.”
Attributing the slow starts to specific areas was an area that Fritz touched on, including taking responsibility for why the offense hasn’t produced the numbers it should.
“I gotta do a better job of coaching them up and making sure the script is correct,” Fritz said. “Also, we just gotta execute. At the point of attack, as far as blocking was concerned, we just weren’t firm in our protection, so we gotta do a better job.”
Although it was not the outcome the coaching staff was anticipating, Fritz & Co. had positive takeaways from both sides of the ball. Being put in challenging situations and facing some adverse ones were a few areas that Fritz mentioned the Cougars can build off of.
Tackling was a negative aspect that the defense has to improve on if it wants a shot at staying in the Big 12 Championship race. Fritz added that using the arms and legs to bring players to the ground was tough and that Houston has to do better.
“We talk all the time about getting your near head in the hoop, attacking the near hip, attacking with your leverage, and we were just a little bit too far away when we initiated our tackling technique,” Fritz said. “You gotta do a great job of using your arms, and you either get two arms around two legs or two arms around torso, getting them down. Some of them were tough. Sometimes you don’t make that tackle, possibly. We had a tough time on a couple of those.”