EUGENE, Ore. -- During the facility tours on Austin Faoliu's visit to Oregon last weekend, he and the other recruits were surprised when they walked into what they assumed would be an empty meeting room and saw 10 current Oregon Ducks sitting at the front.

They had assumed it would be a typical facilities tour (or as typical as an Oregon facilities tour could be), so they were taken by surprise when a personnel official told the families that the coaches would now be leaving. The recruits and their families would be left with the players to ask whatever they wanted out of earshot of any Oregon staff member.

“Players probably feel like they can’t say certain things with coaches being in there,” Oregon coach Willie Taggart said. “We don’t want there to be any bias. We want it to be real and let the parents know exactly how things are done around here.”

Taggart did this during big visits for several years at USF, but perhaps this year at Oregon was the most important time for this sort of thing.

Despite a disastrous start to his Oregon tenure, Willie Taggart had the Ducks surging on the recruiting trail leading up to signing day. AP Photo/Chris Pietsch

The first 46 days of Taggart’s Oregon tenure were rocky. Three players were hospitalized after a series of "grueling" workouts; strength and conditioning coach Irele Oderinde was subsequently suspended. Co-offensive coordinator David Reaves was fired following a DUI arrest. The national storyline surrounding the Ducks was that they couldn’t get out of their own way, that a bad PR week would undo the positive momentum that Taggart's arrival had built.

After an enthusiastic news conference following his hire, Taggart was mostly quoted only in response to questions about the players’ hospitalizations or staff issues. But despite the bad look, recruits didn’t seem to take notice.

Oregon received two commitments just days after Oderinde was fired, and in the week after Reaves’ arrest, the Ducks picked up another four commits. By signing day, the Ducks had inked 22 players without a single 2017 decommitment following the hospitalizations, suspension and firing.

Taggart said other schools tried to use those incidents against the Ducks on the recruiting trail. It backfired when Taggart and his staff took it as an opportunity to be open and honest and respond to what they thought was an unfair portrayal of the Ducks’ situation.

“We weren’t going to walk away from it. We weren’t going to try to hide anything,” Taggart said. “I do think it helped us in the long run. There was negative recruiting all over, and I think that turned a lot of kids off [to other schools]. … That was how we dealt with it.”

That didn’t mean that when parents and recruits were left in a room with 10 players -- including the three who had been hospitalized, Doug Brenner, Sam Poutasi and Cam McCormick -- they didn’t want to discuss everything that had happened in Eugene.

It was Faoliu’s father, Mac, who broke the silence eventually.

“What was the situation with the training and you guys going to the hospital?” Mac Faoliu asked the players.

Brenner, Poutasi and McCormick hadn't publicly discussed the workouts yet, so this was the recruits’ first chance to hear their side of the story, away from the coaches and staff members who had discussed the issues with recruits up to that point.

“That was an opportune time to get the truth out of these kids since there were no cameras and no coaches,” Mac Faoliu said.

“Once it was brought up, you could see there was a sigh of relief and everybody was like, ‘We’re really glad that you guys are allowing us to speak with the players,'" said Aremon Habibi, uncle of 2017 commit Cyrus Habibi-Likio.

Eventually, the questions became more general -- about the transition, the differences in staffs, the expectations for the upcoming season. Despite what might’ve been considered the “worst” 10-day stretch for a Power 5 program this offseason, the Ducks weathered the storm in the eyes of recruits.

“They get the truth from the kids that were actually in it, not just hearing from us. ... That helped big-time,” Taggart said. “And I think they appreciate us being open and not trying to hide anything.”