Before we get into the hardware, let's talk about the blueprint.

When Willie Fritz arrived in Houston, he didn't just bring a playbook. He brought a pipeline. Three of the nine Cougars honored Wednesday on Phil Steele Magazine's preseason All-Big 12 list came straight from Fritz's previous stop at Tulane, the same program he spent years quietly building into one of the most underrated operations in college football. Shadre Hurst. Makhi Hughes. Javion White. Different positions, different stories, same common thread: they played for Fritz before, they know what Fritz demands, and they followed him anyway.

That's not recruiting. That's loyalty. And in a transfer portal era where loyalty has roughly the shelf life of a burner phone, it means something.

But loyalty only gets you so far. Production gets you on the Phil Steele list.

The Anchor

Start with Hurst, because Hurst is where everything begins up front.

The Cartersville, Georgia native was already a known commodity before he ever lined up in a Houston uniform, a two-time All-American Athletic Conference selection at Tulane, a Sporting News All-American Second Team honoree in 2025, the sixth-highest rated guard in the country by PFF and the ninth-highest rated offensive lineman nationally. Those aren't preseason projections. Those are receipts.

Phil Steele rewarded him with a spot on the Preseason All-Big 12 First Team, and it's hard to argue with the logic. Hurst doesn't just protect a quarterback and he controls a game. The way an offensive line anchor is supposed to. He's done it at one level. He did it at another. Now he's doing it in the Big 12, for a head coach who already knows exactly what he's capable of and a conference that's about to find out.

The Playmaker and the Ballhawk

Hurst had company on the First Team. Wide receiver Amare Thomas and defensive back Will James joined him — and both earned it the old-fashioned way.

Thomas put up 966 receiving yards and 12 touchdowns a year ago, the most productive receiving season Houston had seen since 2022. He was already an All-Big 12 First Team selection and earned All-America Honorable Mention recognition from Phil Steele himself. The Birmingham, Alabama native doesn't just make plays — he makes the kind of plays that change momentum, change field position and change the way defenses have to approach every game plan involving Houston's offense.

James, meanwhile, made his presence felt the moment he arrived in Houston. Starting all 13 games in his first season as a Cougar, the defensive back led the team with three interceptions, four turnovers gained, and two forced fumbles, then added a blocked kick and a blocked kick recovery for good measure. That's the kind of stat line that doesn't happen by accident. James wasn't adjusting to a new system. He was imposing himself on it. Phil Steele had him on the All-Big 12 Second Team a year ago. He moved up to First Team for 2026-27. The trajectory is pointing in one direction.

The Supporting Cast—Which Isn't Really Supporting Cast

The rest of Houston's honorees fill out a roster picture that looks increasingly dangerous the longer you stare at it.

Defensive lineman Khalil Laufau earned Preseason Second Team recognition after a season in which he posted seven games with five or more tackles and ten multi-tackle performances — the kind of interior disruption that makes the entire defense easier to run. Tight end Patrick Overmyer, a Kingwood native who arrives after racking up 627 yards, 58 catches and eight touchdowns across three seasons at UTSA and earned Freshman All-America honors in San Antonio, comes in with Third Team recognition and something to prove on a bigger stage.

The Fourth Team is where the Tulane pipeline gets its full accounting. Hughes, a Freshman All-American in 2023 and a two-time All-AAC First Team back whose 1,401 rushing yards in 2024 were the fourth-most in a single season in Tulane program history rrives via Oregon ready to be the kind of running back the Big 12 takes seriously. He's done everything asked of him at every stop. Now Fritz is asking him to do it in Houston, where the spotlight is bigger and the margin for average is nonexistent.

Center Anthony Boswell came in from Toledo with a First Team Freshman All-America plaque already on the shelf and the third-best run-block grade among all FBS centers — numbers that suggest he was already too good for the MAC and is ready to prove it in a power conference. White rounds out the Tulane contingent with 61 tackles, five tackles for loss, 13 pass breakups and a forced fumble from his time in New Orleans, bringing a physicality to the secondary that complements what James already does.

Linebacker Sione Fotu completes the nine-man haul, adding depth to a defensive front that looks built to make offenses uncomfortable all season long.

The Bigger Picture

Nine Cougars on the Phil Steele Preseason All-Big 12 list. Three on the First Team. Names spread across both sides of the ball and every level of the roster.

That's not a team that stumbled into recognition. That's a program that went out and assembled the pieces deliberately, leaning on a head coach's existing relationships, targeting specific holes, and building with players who already know how to win. Fritz didn't need to reinvent the wheel in Houston. He needed to import the parts that made the wheel spin at Tulane and trust that they'd work somewhere bigger.

So far, Phil Steele seems to think they will.The schedule hasn't been played. The games haven't been decided. There's a long way between a preseason list and a conference title. But nine Cougars with their names in print before a single kickoff is a statement, whether anyone wants to call it that or not.

Houston football is here. And it brought company.