Chip Kelly Reveals His Approach to Recruiting Kickers
After UCLA's bad loss Saturday against a sneaky-good Arizona team, Chip Kelly fielded a ton of questions about the injury status of two of the three quarterbacks he played in the Bruins' 27-10 defeat to the Wildcats. In that loss, UCLA kicker Blake Glessner went 1-3 in his field goal attempts.
A reporter in Kelly's media availability asked what Chip Kelly's approach is to recruiting scholarship kickers out of high school, as captured via CBS Sports.
"We look at everybody. Anything, we don't put delineation on 'it has to be a high school kid, it has to be a junior college kid, it has to be a transfer kid' you know. And that's what we did. We brought in a transfer kicker, a scholarship kicker, but we look at everybody in terms of kickers. We have a bunch of keys come through camp, we work guys out a ton".
The reporter continued his line of questioning by asking if Kelly plans on continuing to try to recruit big-time All-American kickers out of high school. Worth noting is how Kelly recruited the son of legendary Philadelphia Eagles kicker David Akers, Luke Akers, to punt for UCLA.
"We do it all the time, I don't understand the question. We look at every high school kicker in the country, we look at every junior college kicker in the country, we look at every transfer kicker in the country," Kelly responded.
A different reporter then commented regarding the reporter asking the original question "I guess he's saying you (Kelly) don't bring them in." Kelly rebuffed this suggestion.
"We do bring them in," he noted. "So we've offered kids, if they don't come here, that's their decision. We've offered high school kids, junior college kids, and transfer kids."
As a team, UCLA has a 50% field goal percentage. RJ Lopez has made 6 out of his 11 attempts in additional to Blake Glessner's one-for-three performance this past Saturday. For context, Glessner transferred to UCLA this season from Montana State, whereas RJ Lopez committed to UCLA directly out of Mission Viejo High School.
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