LSU bolsters its front office
As each day passes, a college football team looks and is run more and more like an NFL franchise.
Between NIL and revenue sharing, there’s a case to be made that the most important people involved in a football program never take a single snap or coach up players, but instead put in work behind the scenes. Brian Kelly, Scott Woodward, and Austin Thomas are doing their best to keep the LSU program ahead of the curve.
This week alone, LSU has hired three new personnel staffers that are raising eyebrows across the college football world.
First up was Kelvin Bolden being hired as LSU’s Assistant General Manager. A native of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Bolden’s college career began at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College and then ended up at Southern Miss. Bolden’s spent the past four years at Ole Miss as the Coordinator of Recruiting Strategy, and the past two years he worked with Austin Thomas. Now, Thomas is bringing Bolden to Baton Rouge to help bolster LSU’s front office staff, and weaken Ole Miss’s.
Two days later, LSU struck again by bringing home an alumnus of the university and New Orleans native. Jeff Martin is coming back home to LSU after spending the past four years in Los Angeles as USC’s Director of Scouting and Player Relations. Martin will be the Tigers Executive Director of Player Personnel according to On3’s Shea Dixon. Martin got his start with LSU way back in the Nick Saban days, and also worked for the program during the Les Miles and Ed Orgeron eras. Martin worked as a graduate student from 2014 through 2017 before being promoted to Assistant Director of Player Personnel and Development.
“Excited to be back home where I belong,” Martin said to Rivals. “I’m looking forward to giving everything I have to the programmed the people in it.”
But the biggest name LSU’s hiring came Friday morning when it was reported that Sam Petitto would be leaving Ohio State’s program for the Tigers’. A native of Amite, Petitto most recently served as Ohio State’s Director of Player Personnel and helped put together the Buckeye’s national championship roster. He worked with Nick Saban for eight years at Alabama and was on staff for the Tide’s 2017 and 2020 national championship seasons, and he also spent two years with Mark Richt as Georgia’s director of player personnel.
Speaking of Georgia. Once upon a time, some kid from Amite named Devonta Smith was committed to Georgia. You can thank Sam Petitto for that. When Saban brought Petitto along to Alabama, guess who followed him? Devonta Smith; and last winter when Petitto left Alabama for Ohio State after Saban retired, who followed him to the Shoe? Caleb Downs. There’s a shortlist of elite talent evaluators and relationship builders that work in the shadows, and LSU went out and got arguably the best in the business and to top it all off he grew up about 60 miles away from Baton Rouge.
Have I heard of any of these three men before this week? No. But the people who really know this side of college football are all in agreement: these are all equally big hires, and getting all three is a coup.
It feels like LSU’s making all the right moves. The program’s assembling a championship-caliber coaching staff, pairing it with a championship-caliber support staff, and hopefully those two will end up producing a championship-caliber roster as early as this fall.