Last Sunday afternoon, reports began to circulate that Georgia Tech was on the verge of hiring Tulane head coach Willie Fritz. But there was one problem: By winning at Cincinnati the day before, Tulane had reached the American Athletic Conference championship game, setting up an opportunity this weekend to play for a Cotton Bowl bid.
Because of the urgency to have a new coach in place to salvage a recruiting class and theoretically prevent a mass exodus of current players into the transfer portal, Georgia Tech needed an answer right away. The 62-year old Fritz, who has slowly and steadily built Tulane over the last seven years, rightly wanted a chance to coach his players in the program’s biggest game in a quarter century without compromising their chances of winning.