OU football is hiring Kansas State director of football scouting Chuck Lillie to an assistant general manager position, SoonerScoop.com reported Tuesday.
Lillie got his start in football operations at Clemson, where he was a recruiting assistant from 2015-17 while Sooners head coach Brent Venables was then the Tigers' defensive coordinator.
Lillie was later a defensive graduate student intern for Venables in 2018. He worked as a pro scouting intern for the New York Giants for part of 2019, then returned to Clemson to serve as a "Playoff analyst" before migrating to KSU, Venables' alma mater, as a scouting analyst in 2020.
Lillie has spent the past four years at K-State, where he "evaluates film of prospects and assists the football coaches in their recruiting efforts" while also helping the recruiting staff host visiting prospects, according to his bio on the KSU athletics website.
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His familiarity with Venables and the other former Clemson assistants now on the OU staff — co-defensive coordinators Zac Alley and Todd Bates and defensive ends coach Miguel Chavis — should now serve to further aid the Sooners' talent evaluation and recruiting efforts.
OU's football support staff has undergone some major changes since the end of the 2023 season. Director of on-campus recruiting Lee Davis left for UCF and was replaced by Jolie Ale, who'd previously held a similar position at Utah.
Director of recruiting and player personnel J.R. Sandlin also left Norman to become the general manager of player personnel at SMU.
Venables said in March that OU has been working for some time to retool its support staff so that it aligns with the rest of college football. Many teams are now hiring "General Managers" who are responsible for helping the coaches with roster construction.
"I think we'd be naive if we didn't look at the change that's going on in college football, both currently and the landscape," Venables said in March. "The toothpaste is definitely out of the tube and it's not going, you're not putting it back in. So we are always looking at, again, all of our processes, our programs, our support systems on how we can continue to improve and be efficient, be really good at what we're doing.
"I always look at trying to hire people who are smarter than me and to surround myself with really good intelligent people that have either the experience where you want to go or they have acumen to learn and grow and get better and lead. So we're always looking at ways to get better. There's some restructuring and reorganization that we're looking at doing over the next... and we've been working on this for 16, 18 months. Where again, a lot of it's where we feel like college football is going and making sure that we were in a position of strength, we're not reacting and when it does happen.
"This is going to continue to be just kind of a process and it's, you wish it was a little more congruent, but, you know, it's kind of a piecemeal is what's going on in college football. So we've been working hard and diligently trying to anticipate the things that we do often do programmatically to strengthen us. So that'll be somewhere here in the near future."
Now, it appears Lillie is another addition to the OU support staff "piecemeal."