DAVID BARRON
A bittersweet weekend for KPRC’s Lainie Fritz.
While it is increasingly popular to refer to football teams with warm and fuzzy family analogies, football really is a family sport for KPRC (Channel 2) sports reporter Lainie Fritz, whose father, Willie Fritz, is head coach of the Tulane University team that faces the University of Houston on Saturday at TDECU Stadium.
The Green Wave is struggling at 3-6, losers of four in a row, and will be heavy underdogs to UH. Still, the game in Houston was going to be a highlight for Fritz, who was looking forward to seeing friends and family.
However, as Willie Fritz takes the field Saturday with his team, Lainie Fritz will be in Jacksonville, Fla., preparing for her first road trip covering the Texans for Channel 2.
“It was hard to call (my father) and tell him,” she said. “I had (Saturday) marked on my calendar and was excited to be able to see everyone. But I had an opportunity to go to the Texans game, and he was happy for me.”
Besides, given Tulane’s struggles this year in Fritz’s first year as head coach, “I don’t know if I would have wanted to cover that game anyway. (But) it will be hard not to be there.”
Fritz spent most of her school days in Winford, Mo., when her father coached at Central Missouri. She graduated from Sam Houston State and was in school in Huntsville when her father was head coach of the Bearkats from 2010-13, including two trips to the Football Championship Subdivision title game.
Along the way, she learned about covering football as a journalism student at Sam Houston, and her father learned a little bit about TV, agreeing to hold her camera when she did stand-up shots for the school’s Bearkat Sports Network.
Willie Fritz also served as his daughter’s cameraman last year, when he coached at Georgia Southern, and she covered the team’s game against The Citadel while working at a station in Charleston, S.C.
“He was pretty good at it,” she said. “I give him credit for sure. Not a lot of head coaches would be willing to pick up a camera and shoot a stand-up for someone. That’s the kind of guy he is. I appreciate him.”
It helped, she said, that Georgia Southern won the game.
Tulane has had just three winning records this century, so Fritz faces an uphill battle. Still, Lainie Fritz said she is optimistic.
“It’s been difficult this year, not being able to see him as much and knowing that he’s going through a hard season,” she said. “But I have all the confidence in the world that he’s going to get things turned around.”
Harlan draws Texans-Jags
Kevin Harlan already knows that he’ll be at Super Bowl LI, calling the game at NRG Stadium for Westwood One radio with
Boomer Esiason. He will get his first look at the Texans this season for CBS on Sunday when he calls the HoustonJacksonville game with Rich Gannon.
Harlan calls Monday night games for Westwood One, so he’s already seen Brock Osweiler at his most mediocre. Osweiler, he said, reflects the Texans — both are works in progress.
“He’s got a lot more on his shoulders, and that’s a big adjustment for a guy who has just been given a big contract,” he said.
“(The Texans) are trying to get that worked out, and obviously they miss J.J. Watt. He controlled so much of the game. He was the face of the franchise, and when that happens, somebody has to step in and fill that role. I don’t know if that’s been done yet.”
Harlan, though, is big on Bill O’Brien, and he notes, correctly, that the Texans have some wiggle room to figure things out because of their good fortune of being in the AFC South.
“That division lends itself to a team trying to gather its parts and establish something of a new identity with a new quarterback and without Watt,” he said.
Down the road, Harlan looks forward to Super Bowl week in Houston, even though his radio perch on the ninth floor is considerably farther from the field than the TV booth on the stadium’s suite level.
Another significant difference between calling NFL games on TV and radio — and, I must admit, I had not considered this previously — is that the radio guys can’t rely on watching the games on their in-booth monitor because they, like the rest of us, have a delay of several seconds between live action and the play unfolding on their TV screen.
Accordingly, Harlan relies on binoculars to help him call personnel changes and between-play developments and then calls the plays with the naked eye.
The most significant difference, though, he said, is “with TV, it’s picture first, analyst second, replays, graphics and all that third and the play-by-play guy fourth. Maybe (the play-by-play announcer) tries to pick out things outside the play, like a good block or a defensive adjustment.
“On radio, it’s all about the play-byplay guy — voice, tempo, word usage, inflection, reporting skills and the ability to have a rapport with the analyst,” he said. “I love the challenge; not that TV doesn’t have its challenges, too. But when you see it (on TV), I don’t have to say it.”
In either venue, he’s one of the best voices on the air. This will be his first Texans game on TV this season after calling five in a 15-game stretch in 2014-15.
Four DVRs, no waiting
ESPN/ABC college football announcer pairings include Mike Patrick and Ed Cunningham on Baylor-Oklahoma, Joe Tesitore and Todd Blackledge on Mississippi State-Alabama, Mike Couzens and Dan Hawkins on SMUEast Carolina, Dave Pasch and Greg McElroy on LSU-Arkansas and Brent Musburger and Jesse Palmer on Ole Miss-Texas A&M. … The “Astroline” offseason radio show returns at 7 p.m. Tuesday on KBME (790 AM), Astros Radio Network affiliates and at astros. com/astroline with Robert Ford as host and general manager Jeff Luhnow as guest . ... Finalists for this year’s Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame include former Astros announcer Dewayne Staats, Gary Cohen (Mets), Jacques Doucet (Expos, Blue Jays), Ken Harrelson (Red Sox, Yankees, White Sox), Pat Hughes (Twins, Brewers, Cubs), Bill King (A’s), Mike Krukow (Giants) and Ned Martin (Red Sox). … ESPN’s College GameDay will be in Seattle for USC-Washington. … Jim Brown is the subject of Friday’s “A Football Life” on NFL Network. … HBO has canceled the Bill Simmons show “Any Given Wednesday.” … Nielsen reported significant drops in distribution for several sports networks, including 700,000-plus for NBA TV and NBC Sports Network, 600,000-plus for ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, 500,000plus for MLB Network and 300,000plus for Fox Sports 1. ESPN, whose disagreement with the numbers prompted Nielsen to withdraw its estimates before subsequently reconfirming them, said the Nielsen data was “inconsistent with much more moderated trends observed by other respected third-party analysts” and did not include such platforms as Sling TV and Playstation Vue. … Fran Fraschilla, the former college head coach who lives in Highland Park and who helped us out with the new Dave Campbell’s Texas Basketball publication, has re-upped with ESPN and this year will call Big 12 games with Bob Wischusen as Brent Musburger moves to SEC games. UH alum Reid Gettys also will call some Big 12 games on ESPNU. … Former Raiders executive Amy Trask, now an analyst for CBS Sports Network, says she supports the concept of full-time NFL game officials, citing increasingly complex rules and continually advancing technology to ensure correct calls . ... Fox Sports ratings guru Michael Mulvihill notes that through Week 9, NFL consumption is down 14 percent — 4 percent on Fox, 8 percent on CBS, 16 percent on Thursday nights over the air, 29 percent on NFL Network Thursday games, 18 percent on Sunday night and 19 percent on Monday night. Mulvihill said on Twitter that he expects to see improvement over the second half of the season, “but not all at once and possibly not all the way back” to last year’s figures.