Ole Miss football officially announcing the hiring of five staff members picking off four staffers from rival LSU and one from UCLA.
On Sunday, Ole Miss football X/Twitter lit up with the announcements of Frank Wilson, Austin Thomas, Kelvin Bolden, Jacob Sugarman and Jai Choudhary as official hires to Pete Golding’s program in Oxford. We had a previous post about Wilson taking over as running backs coach, but the announcement had the New Orleans recruiting guru as a senior associate head coach as well.
As we have already discussed, he is coming back to Ole Miss after a stint at LSU and also at UTSA.
Thomas was announced as the President of Football Operations/General Manager. He previously worked at Ole Miss during the 2022 and 2023 seasons before departing for LSU. His resume is filled with SEC experience with five seasons in Baton Rouge from 2013-2017 and then working a few years at Texas A&M.
Bolden comes back to Oxford as well from LSU, and he is now the assistant general manager elevating from a recruiting coordinator position he held previously at Ole Miss for three years before spending last season with the Tigers in an assistant general manager role.
Another LSU staffer jumping to Ole Miss is Choudhary who is now the Director of Player Personnel. He previously was in Oxford as a graduate assistant and then assistant director of player personnel then moved to Baton Rouge for this past season.
Ole Miss’ new Director of Scouting is former UCLA staffer Jacob Sugarman. After interning in the NFL, Sugarman did his graduate work at LSU before going to UCLA to be its director of scouting. If there is one hire that is more unknown than the rest, it’s this one. The Bruins were a train wreck last season, but Sugarman was only there for nine months.
With the transfer portal opening at the end of this week, there is a ton of work to be done in terms of scouting potential additions to the team, managing NIL budget and also, oh yeah, planning for a CFP Quarterfinal at the Sugar Bowl against the Georgia Bulldogs. I’ve got a feeling there will be some 100 hour work weeks ahead.
