The bad news was just getting started when UCLA’s football recruiting staff learned that DeShaun Foster had been dismissed.
Co-workers 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.
Across three columns, the longtime former NFL scouts detailed a plan for the retention of committed high school prospects, the rebuilding of the recruiting class and the ways they would implement changes.
As he glanced at that same whiteboard late last week, some 2½ months later, Darlington beamed.
“I’m looking at the implementation column,” he said, “and it’s nothing but red check marks. That means we completed that task.”
Along the way, they salvaged a recruiting class ahead of the early signing period that starts Wednesday and may have jump-started the rebuilding efforts of Bob Chesney, the James Madison coach who is expected to be formally announced as Foster’s successor later this week.
Pulling this thing together sometimes meant just listening to an upset player or parent. Honesty about the uncertainty became a guiding principle. Still, there were times when a phrase about prioritization written on another whiteboard in Darlington’s office — “Eat the elephant one bite at a time” — might have seemed to mock him.
This week, Darlington and his staff can finally exhale, if only for a moment. A recruiting class that suffered 13 defections in the wake of Foster’s firing has added nine players, including five who flipped their allegiances from other schools and four who recommitted to the Bruins.
“The coaching change didn’t slow anything down,” interim coach Tim Skipper said. “The university is still here, still a proud, rich football tradition school, and just them getting out there and seeing the kids and selling what we have for ’em, I mean, it’s been awesome.”
UCLA’s recruiting class of 18 players includes three four-star prospects and is ranked No. 43 nationally by 247 Sports — ahead of Vanderbilt and Utah, teams that have each won 10 games this season and feature widely respected coaches.
The Bruins recruiting staff constructed this class while being mindful of a new coach’s need to supplement the roster with some of his own players plus others from the transfer portal. There was also a deliberate attempt to find prospects who could fit a variety of schemes.
“The new head coach will have an opportunity to bring in his players, decide where the guys fit,” Darlington said. “We just wanted to ensure that we had something here for him to work with by the time he arrived.”
But what sort of assurances were given to the high school prospects committing to play for an unknown coach? Cooper Javorsky, an offensive lineman from San Juan Hills High who decommitted from the Bruins in September only to come back on board late last month, said he was told that his offer of a grant-in-aid would be honored no matter who was chosen as the new coach.
Darlington said UCLA’s recruiting approach fully recognized the unpredictability of the situation, including the futures of coaches trying to land prospects who may never get to play for them.
“We led with honesty,” Darlington said, “and acknowledging that this is uncharted territory for many of us.”
Having spent 14 years as an NFL scout with the Carolina Panthers, Darlington knew what to look for in a player. But this pursuit wasn’t strictly about talent. The players he wanted also had to fit what he called a Bruin profile — someone who could thrive academically and socially at UCLA while also competing at a high level in the Big Ten.
Darlington and Price put the recruiting staff through a scout school over the summer, outlining the evaluation process that could help snag those sorts of prospects.
With a high school class that was on pace to possibly crack the top 20 in the national rankings having been decimated by departures upon the coaching change, the recruiting staff went about compiling a list of players who fit the Bruin profile and might have been overlooked before Darlington and Price arrived in the spring.
“I had a gut feeling that if we could get one commit and one flip,” Darlington said, “then we could create some momentum.”
It happened in late October when Travis Robertson, an offensive tackle from West Bloomfield, Mich., flipped his commitment from Bowling Green to UCLA. The next day, C.J. Lavender, a cornerback from Mater Dei High, made a similar move by backing out of his commitment to Washington and pledging to become a Bruin.
The early success that came in the wake of the Bruins’ three-game winning streak created a buzz not just in the recruiting community but also among staffers inside UCLA’s football offices.
“Once those first prospects decided to jump in,” Darlington said, “they really, really took a lot of pride in that and believed they could do more and there was not a day that I wasn’t getting a text message or Steven wasn’t getting a phone call saying, ‘Hey, I think we have a shot at this guy.’ ”
Among those possibilities were several prospects the staff already knew well. Even after he decommitted, Javorsky continued to show up for UCLA games at the Rose Bowl, often chatting with offensive line coach Andy Kwon on the field. The staff’s continued pursuit paid off when Javorsky joined a handful of previously committed players who looked elsewhere only to change their minds and say they were coming to UCLA.
“Honestly,” Darlington said of a decommitted player coming back into the fold, “It feels like somebody returning home.”
Javorsky said UCLA’s staff was the biggest reason for his recommitment, citing recruiting analyst Aaron Brin, on-campus recruiting specialist O’nalisa Hall, senior director of recruiting operations Marshawn Friloux and executive senior associate athletic director Erin Adkins.
“I can name a ton of people,” Javorsky said. “Through everything, they have all stayed in contact almost every day and made it clear they wanted me on campus. That meant a lot. I really liked how consistent they were with me even after I decommitted.”
During a recent conversation inside his office, Darlington occasionally glanced at the whiteboard that had provided a blueprint for success, the players his staff landed becoming their legacy unless they’re retained.
“Names changed, the system did not, and I mean it,” Darlington said. “When I look at it now, I’m smiling.”