Wes Fritz’s first football memory is watching Michael Bishop play quarterback at Blinn Junior College. As a grown man, he still swears Bishop is the best player he’s ever seen. 

This was 1995, about 15 years too early for viral YouTube videos and social media clips that made Cam Newton famous at Blinn before he won the Heisman Trophy at Auburn. Instead, Bishop’s highlights were immortalized in Fritz’s mind as he followed his father Willie’s coaching career from the JUCO ranks to Central Missouri. 

Soon, the world saw what a young Wes did when Bishop transferred to Kansas State and won the Davey O’Brien Award in 1998. It was the first moment Wes grew infatuated with the evaluation aspect of football. How did a guy like Michael Bishop end up in junior college and become a better player than guys with big-time offers out of high school?

“I probably drove him crazy growing up,” Wes said. “He’d get home and want to decompress from the office, but I’d be bugging him about every single player on the team. ‘How’s he doing?’ or ‘Rank your top five fastest guys on the team.’”

Wes played basketball for two years at State Fair Community College and two years at Sam Houston, where he “played hard and was a good teammate.” Then, he left the hardwood and signed onto his father’s Georgia Southern staff as part of the recruiting and personnel department, determined to find the next Michael Bishop.

Two years later, Fritz and his staff arrived at Tulane in December 2015, when there was only a February Signing Day. Fritz spent a month-and-a-half scouring film and came across a wide receiver named Darnell Mooney from Gadsden, Alabama, whom he loved. But the coaches who visited Mooney reported how small he was, just 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds. Mooney had zero college offers, but Wes convinced Willie to take a chance on this undersized wide receiver with an incredible highlight tape. Mooney started games as a true freshman, became an all-conference pick and now plays for the Atlanta Falcons.

In that same class, Fritz signed cornerback BoPete Keyes, who went from one college offer to a Kansas City Chiefs’ Draft pick. Between 2020-23, 10 Tulane players made the NFL. Running back Tyjae Spears, the 2022 American Athletic Conference Player of the Year, had three offers out of high school and now plays for the Tennessee Titans. Current Buffalo Bills linebacker Dorian Williams had one offer out of high school but developed into a First-Team All-Conference player at Tulane.

Wes moved with Willie to Houston in the same role this offseason. Just as the elder Fritz has coached at every level of football, his son/chief scout has studied every level, too. While Houston’s projected for a rebuilding season in Year One of the Fritz era, their recruiting class, maintained by Wes and co-Director of Player Personnel Casey Smithson, is currently ranked fourth in the Big 12 compared to 14th last year, per On3.

Not that you’ll hear Wes’s soft-spoken southern drawl sing his own praises. 

“The longer I’ve been around, the more I’ve seen not to get too high or too low,” Wes said. “Growing up around the office, there’s going to be peaks and valleys with football. One week you’re on top of the world, and you have to keep the same approach.”

Smithson, his partner-in-crime, has spent several years on the player personnel case himself. He started as a recruiting intern during his freshman year at West Virginia in 2007, working his way up to graduate assistant by the beginning of 2012. Whereas Houston’s current recruiting department has five full-time employees, the WVU staff consisted of two positions: a full-time employee and a GA. 

“There really wasn’t any type of whole recruiting staffs back then,” Smithson said. “It was either a Director of High School Relations or an assistant coach that was deemed the recruiting coordinator.” 

But the manpower on staff evolved as recruiting became a full-time operation. Smithson said the rules around recruiting, such as the Transfer Portal and removal of official visit limitations, have changed more since he got to Houston in 2020 than when he was at West Virginia from 2007 to 2019.

Most official visits used to fall on bye weeks or winter months. Now, Houston can host recruits during spring practice, the summer and game weeks in the fall. There were upwards of 50 recruits at some of the spring practices, which requires a larger staff to talk to each of them so they get the most out of the visit. And Houston will gladly make the investment to see how the player fits in on campus.

“Being able to come to Houston and play football is a privilege,” Wes said. “We’re trying to make sure somebody sees the importance of that. We’re also trying to see how they interact with everybody in the building. I’ve been around his teams for forever, and if you’re somebody with very low character, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

As the number of full-time employees increased, their job descriptions became more specific. A Director of On-Campus Recruiting and a Director of Scouting are in different silos. The On-Campus director doesn’t create film cut-ups. The scout doesn’t plan where the visiting recruits will eat dinner. Smithson and Fritz, however, were trained in an era where they had to excel at scouting and hospitality, giving them an edge now.

“We’ve kind of had to do a little bit of everything,” Smithson said. “We both see how that is, instead of a lot of people nowadays who are very specific in certain roles that they’re asked to do.”