Houston long snapper Jacob Garza defined by work ethic
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José de Jesus Ortiz, Founder & Editor in Chief
- October 11, 2025
UH's Jacob Garza benefits from strong work ethic
HOUSTON – A few hours before he was set to join his University of Houston football teammates at a local hotel to prepare for last weekend’s game against Texas Tech, Jacob Garza was busy putting the final Houston Blue touches on the gridiron’s outline at TDECU Stadium.
When the long snapper from Corpus Christi is not practicing with the Cougars or studying for his master’s in management leadership, he can usually be found at his part-time job with the UH groundscrew.
“On Thursday (before the Tech game) we were just touching up the blue paint,” he said. “We went back and added another coat, making it pop for the game.”
If you knew where to look, you could have seen Garza’s touches on the perimeter of the field from the 20-yard line, around the end zone to the opposite 20-yard line and around coaches’ boxes and referees’ boxes.
The 6-foot-2, 215-pound Garza has left his mark on UH beyond the gridiron. Whether in the classroom, playing football or mowing or weed-whacking with the groundscrew at the school’s other athletic venues, his fingerprints are everywhere.
Former walk-on
Garza arrived on campus as a freshman from Corpus’ Veterans Memorial High as a walk-on. He impressed enough to earn a starting position for Dana Holgorsen in 2020. Unfortunately for Garza, he caught a severe case of long Covid and was limited to only four games. At one point, he lost 40 pounds in one week.
“Anything I ate would come back up,” he says. “I couldn’t eat. It lasted for about a year. I didn’t have much of an appetite. If I did (eat), it came back. I got the weight I needed back. It took a lot of trial-and-error stuff. Different shakes and going into the weight room and then eating after as much I could.”
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He redshirted his sophomore year while trying to regain his weight. Then he split reps with another long snapper in 2023, which was his third year on campus but technically his redshirt freshman season because the NCAA didn’t count the 2020 Covid season against eligibility for any players.
Garza didn’t allow a blocked punt over seven games while also earning All-Academic honors in the American Athletic Conference. After the Cougars moved to the Big 12 in 2024, Garza earned First Team Fall Academic honors yet again.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology in May 2024 and was prepared to leave UH after new coach Willie Fritz brought a long snapper on scholarship. Garza competed with the transfer long snapper through spring ball before entering the transfer portal.
Scholarship request
Garza knew how hard his parents Rene and Christy Garza worked to put him and his older sister through college. The family ran three small businesses – an inflatable bouncy house rental and multiple Kona Ice and Travelin’ Tom’s Coffee franchises.
“He told the coaches, ‘I would like to finish my career at Houston, but I don’t want to put my parents anymore in debt. I feel like I earned it,’” Christy Garza recalls. “It was very few days (later, and) they called and said, ‘We have a scholarship for you. Can you put your name out of the portal?”
Jacob Garza is adamant that he was ready to leave UH and perhaps even college football if he didn’t get a scholarship after four years at the school. But when asked if he was ready to pursue a master’s degree while on football scholarship for his last two years of eligibility, he pounced.
He starred on and off the field in his first season on scholarship as a graduate student. In April, the UH athletic department named Jacob Garza the Male Academic Cougar of the Year. After earning a spot on UH’s Spring 2024 Dean’s List in his final semester as an undergrad, he received CSC Academic All-District and Fall Academic All-Big 12 Conference honors.
Moreover, he had 83 snaps, 58 on punt coverage and 25 on field goals and extra points as the starting long snapper. Garza played 12 games and even recovered a fumble for the first time in college career.
Academic excellence
Earlier this season, he was named a semifinalist for the prestigious William V. Campbell Trophy, which is college football’s premier scholar-athlete award. He joined Texas Tech’s Jacob Rodriguez, Arkansas’ Fernando Carmona Jr. among 78 FBS nominees selected by the National Football Foundation for their excellence in academics, athletics and community leadership.
“He’s an animal,” Rene Garza says of Jacob. “Football is like a full-time job, hands down. It’s a full-time job just to be a college athlete. He surprises us. He works on the grounds crew and takes care of his studies. And he’s very good at prioritizing.”
Jacob Garza credits his parents with instilling the work ethic that has helped him balance so much at UH. He was 4 years old when his father got into the inflatable business after seeing how much Jacob enjoyed having an inflatable at his fourth birthday party.
It didn’t take long for Jacob to join his father and “work” setting up inflatables at parties around Corpus Christi. After securing his driver’s license at 16, he spent his weekends delivering and setting up bouncy houses with his own crew of buddies.
“May is obviously for us the busiest month of the year because we deal with all the field days and family picnics,” Rene Garza said. “We set up four or five schools each day. He’d be running crews.”
Attention to detail
Rene Garza gushes with pride at the memory of a local principal calling him to rave about Jacob’s professionalism and attention to detail. Jacob still helps with his family’s business as a resource customers and employees can call to answer questions or set up appointments.
Jacob would like to pursue a career in project management after he receives his master’s degree. He’s been managing projects, after all, since he was 16 years old.
“With my family’s business, the bouncy house and everything in the sense I did (project management),” he said. “I looked over everything and made sure everything was up to our standards and the safety was to our standards. I don’t think I could live with knowing what I set up hurt somebody.”
At UH, he executed similarly on the football field, delivering his snaps to the punters or putting the final touches with the groundscrew to make sure the fields were in the best shape possible. Attention to detail has been key with a strong work ethic in the forefront.
José de Jesus Ortiz
Founder & Editor in Chief
Award-winning writer José de Jesus Ortiz, a former lead sports columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has covered Major League Baseball since 1997 in Los Angeles, St. Petersburg, New York and Houston. He was the first Latino to serve as president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.
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