photo by: AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez

Houston head coach Willie Fritz stands on the sideline in the first half of an NCAA college football game against TCU, Friday, Oct. 4, 2024, in Fort Worth, Texas.

Kansas City, Mo. — Kansas owed some portion of its attendance figure at GEHA Field Arrowhead Stadium on Saturday to the friends and family of the opposing head coach.

“I’m worried about tickets this week,” Houston coach Willie Fritz joked, later adding, “I’ll be helping them out with the crowd a little bit.”

Fritz made those sorts of comments because he was expecting plenty of friends and family in attendance as part of his return to his home city.

Now in his first season with the Cougars, the Shawnee Mission native had chances in the past to play in his home state of Kansas as a head coach. He did it as recently as 2022, when his Tulane team beat Kansas State in Manhattan. And in a non-football capacity, he was selected as Coffeyville Community College’s commencement speaker in May, by a school where he once served as defensive coordinator.

But he hasn’t often had the chance to play in the Kansas City area, at least since he was coaching in the Division II Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association for Central Missouri from 1997 to 2009. (As it happens, that was also where he first crossed paths with KU’s Lance Leipold, who served in various capacities in the same conference as an assistant in Omaha.)

“My whole family, my wife’s whole family lives there in Kansas City,” Fritz said on Monday, noting he has a sister and four brothers in the area. “I’m the only one who’s ventured outside, I guess, of the city limits.”

Fritz’s father Harry was the executive director of the NAIA, the athletic association long headquartered in the Kansas City area. In addition, Fritz’s brother Ed and sister-in-law Ann, for example, are both prominent and highly successful local high school basketball coaches; Ed, currently the head coach at North Kansas City, previously led eventual NCAA and NBA champion Christian Braun to a series of state titles at Blue Valley Northwest. Also, Fritz’s wife, Susan, attended KU.

Fritz told KSHB 41 in 2022 shortly before KU played in the Final Four in New Orleans, “When KU’s on, I’ll watch because my wife went to KU and to watch Christian. He’s had a sensational career there.”

Balancing byes

A quirk of the calendar this college football season has produced two bye weeks for teams like KU. Only one additional game, the Sunflower Showdown next weekend in Manhattan, now separates the Jayhawks from another week off.

Leipold said KU didn’t let this logistical idiosyncrasy affect much about the way it approached its initial bye week. Wide receiver Luke Grimm said you wouldn’t have known anything was different about the schedule from observing this first week. After losing at ASU, the Jayhawks lifted weights Monday and Friday, practiced Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and took Saturday off. They then began their game week with a Sunday night practice and a Monday off day before proceeding as normal in the lead-up to the game against Houston.

The bye week also provided, as usual, some benefits for recruiting, even though some of the coaches’ travel plans got disrupted by hurricanes in the Southeast.

“We kind of postponed some travel there for a few guys,” Leipold said on Monday. “We rearranged a couple. But all in all we got everybody out. I got out on Friday. We got to some places and we got a few more to get to as well.”

Shifting tides

Leipold offered some opinions on some nationwide changes in college athletics that unfolded during the Jayhawks’ bye week.

Of the shortening of transfer portal entry windows from 45 to 30 days, he said they’re still bound to get reevaluated periodically, and noted that coaches receive a survey now and then asking for their thoughts, even if their wishes aren’t always fulfilled.

He suggested that the NCAA’s elimination of the National Letter of Intent program for signing student-athletes to schools simply finalized what was already in effect.

“Heck, it wasn’t worth anything anyway for the last three years,” Leipold said. “(You can) get a waiver for anything, nothing’s binding anymore.”

He did add on a more optimistic note, regarding the rapidly evolving new era of collegiate athletics, “I do think there’s at least some talk of some decent things that’ll help kind of put it in a little bit more of an area of understanding for everyone.”

This and that

Houston, which has been through a coaching change in the intervening years, had just seven returning players and two starters back from when it played and lost to KU in Houston in 2022. The Jayhawks still featured on their roster 28 players who participated in that game, including 11 starters.

The two teams were supposed to play in 2023, but after Houston moved to the Big 12, KU replaced that matchup with a road game at Nevada. (The Jayhawks won 31-24.)