Bruin Bites: UCLA Football Hires New Director of Player Personnel While Olaijah Griffin Decommits

UCLA Football coach Chip Kelly has hired Geoff Martzen as the team’s new Director of Player Personnel. This news has been reported by several outlets today including FootballScoop.com and Bruin Report Online’s Twitter account.

The confirmation appears to come from Martzen’s Twitter profile where he describes himself as “Director of Player Personnel- UCLA Football.”

Martzen served in the same capacity at Colorado State for the past three seasons as well as BYU in 2014. Prior to working at BYU, Martzen also worked in recruiting at Boise State and Alabama. Martzen earned his bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology at Fresno State.

Martzen replaces Matt Bernstein who has been the Director of Player Personnel for the past two seasons and has been with UCLA Football since 2011. FootballScoop.com is also reporting that Bernstein’s staff has been told they won’t be retained.

In other UCLA Football news, it appears that Olaijah Griffin, one of three UCLA Football commits who did not sign during the Early Signing Period, has decommitted from UCLA.

Griffin has not tweeted about decommitting, but he did tell Volquest.com, which is Rivals.com’s Tennessee site that he has decommitted from UCLA.

Personally, I think Griffin would be a good addition for UCLA and I’m hopeful that he still will choose to come to Westwood, but we’ll just have to wait until February to find out for sure. Obviously, Chip Kelly, Jerry Azzinaro and Paul Rhoads may want to go in a different direction.

But, so far, I’m not particularly happy with the way recruiting has gone since Kelly became head coach. I much prefer to have players flipping to the Bruins than being flipped by other schools and I hope we start seeing that trend turn itself around very soon.


Go Bruins!