I haven’t been able to reach Hoffman. So I called his sister, Kira Soto, who relayed the news to him. She said that all the offers were too much for him to process. Besides, he did not want people from his past to see how far he had fallen. Each time another text or phone call came in, she said, he cringed.

Hoffman, 40, was recruited and coached at North Carolina by Mack Brown. Some readers asked me what Brown thought of his former player’s condition. Brown coached several hundred players in his career, so he cannot be expected to keep close tabs on all of them. When I talked to Brown on the phone Tuesday, he said he had heard of Hoffman’s situation and was haunted by it.

“Sometimes those players that are struggling don’t want to reach out because they want to accomplish everything on their own and don’t want their teammates to know that things aren’t going well for them,” said Brown, a college head coach for nearly 30 years. “Ryan was one of those players I lost. I hadn’t talked to him for so many years. But now that we’ve found him, we have to do all we can so we don’t lose him for good.”

Brown said Hoffman showed up at U.N.C. in the mid-1990s quiet and aloof. He often kept to himself. Brown said he did not recall Hoffman having any head injuries and said he could not be sure — like everyone else, really — what had caused Hoffman to get so far off track. Brain disease from repeated head trauma cannot be diagnosed in a living person. One of the things we know for sure is that Hoffman graduated from U.N.C. in 1998 and has declined ever since.

For Brown, the bright side of hearing this sad news has been seeing so many of Hoffman’s former teammates rallying to Hoffman’s side.