The Michigan Wolverines have reportedly added another experienced name to their recruiting department, as Michigan is hiring longtime NFL scout Chris Pettit to be the program’s assistant general manager. This was first reported by 247Sports on Monday evening.
Pettit has extensive professional scouting experience, having spent more than 20 years in the NFL with the New York Giants, including as the Giants’ director of college scouting. During his time there, Pettit played a big role in building two Super Bowl-winning teams, helping identify and evaluate talent at the highest level.
He has also spent time outside of a traditional team personnel role. Pettit is the chief operating officer and a co-founder of Scout Smarter AI, an “AI-powered, patented talent evaluation platform built by NFL executives” that claims to “boost productivity, elevate decision-making, and gain the competitive edge” by generate scouting reports and collecting data on players, player analysis and comparison and performance prediction models, to name a few.
Pettit will work directly with new Michigan general manager Dave Peloquin, who was hired back in February and took over for former general manager Sean Magee, who was not retained by new head coach Kyle Whittingham. Peloquin was in charge of the college division of the agency Athletes First, and worked at Notre Dame for more than 20 years before that in the program’s recruiting department.
This is Peloquin’s second known hire, as he also brought in Skylar Phan, “an up-and-coming superstar in the landscape” according to a source of Steve Wiltfong’s. She was previously the director of recruiting strategy at USC, and she will very likely have a similar role at Michigan.
On paper, bringing in Pettit is a pretty savvy move. It’s safe to assume the Wolverines will begin using the Scout Smarter AI platform, if it wasn’t already doing so. And they should — anything that can be used as a competitive advantage should be used, and Pettit certainly brings that with him at the least. He and Peloquin provide a solid 1-2 punch in terms of the scouting and evaluation of recruits, while Phan will be able to roll out the red carpet for recruits when they visit Ann Arbor.
