The bad news was just getting started when UCLA’s football recruiting staff learned that DeShaun Foster had been dismissed.
Coworkers would walk into the office of Khary Darlington, the team’s general manager, to give him one wretched update after another.
This player’s out. That player’s out. A parent just called crying and confused.
“I mean,” Darlington said, “it literally felt like walking through a landmine field.”
Once they had answered every call and met with athletic department administrators and the remaining coaches to devise a framework for a recruiting process that had just become infinitely more complicated, Darlington and assistant general manager Steven Price started writing on a whiteboard inside the Wasserman Football Center.