Like some of you, I was pretty surprised to see that James Grisom not appear on the depth chart when the season started. Grisom had some really nice moments on the team last year. Remember this?

Two separate events seemed to force him off the Bears. First, he would lose his scholarship. Michael Rosen of the Daily Cal has the story.

He says he met with wide receiver coach Rob Likens, who was stunned Grisom hadn’t been informed prior to receiving the email. Grisom later talked with Dykes, who informed him the plan was always to opt out of renewing after one year, and that it was never planned on to extend past that year. This was news to Grisom — Dykes never communicated this information to him. "If it was a one-year deal, then he should have been told that," says his mother, Geanette. "We never had a clue of that. We were planning for another great season." When asked for comment, Dykes issued the following written statement on the question of the decision not to renew Grisom’s scholarship: "One of the best things I have the opportunity to do as a head coach is reward a deserving student-athlete with an athletic scholarship and we’ve been able to do that 13 times in the 21 months that I have been at Cal. It is always a big day not only for the scholarship recipient but also to their teammates who see hard work put in both on and off the field rewarded. "We value the contributions of every member of our team and any time we have available scholarships we award them to deserving student-athletes, but we also are limited to 85 scholarships and must manage those accordingly."

Now, it's fairly common practice for walk-ons to be awarded conditional one-year scholarships. I'm surprised at the lack of communication between the coaching staff and Grisom about those conditions though. They should have made it pretty clear to new scholarship players that they would have to work to maintain those scholarships and that they were only for this year, not four-year deals.

And it's a bit surprising that Grisom lost his scholarshp considering he's probably one of the team's academic standouts. The issue seems to be the number of receivers on this team--Cal seems to be loaded with talent at the position and Dykes/Likens probably figured that more scholarships were needed elsewhere. Hence Grisom's scholarship wasn't renewed.

However, despite losing the scholarship, Grisom decided not to appeal and was all set to compete to be on this team, when he received even worse news.

But then the financial aid office notified him just before the start of football season that the $11,000 — a product of an overpay in financial aid he heard about a few months earlier — couldn’t be paid in loans; they needed it immediately, and it became too much of a burden. He knew he needed to leave the team. Football, days ago one of his life’s greatest priorities, was the furthest thing from his mind. “Now, I probably gotta take on two jobs,” Grisom says. “And pay for rent, books, housing — all that stuff. And also pay this $11,000?” ... Federal regulations stipulate that students cannot receive aid above their budgeted amount, determined by the campus financial aid office. In the fall of 2013, the financial aid office made an administrative error: Their systems failed to register that Grisom and a handful of other athletes were receiving both need-based and athletic aid in excess of their respective budgets. Feldman said she couldn’t comment on specific cases, but did say that of the current cases, $11,000 is the “largest amount” an athlete needs to pay back as a result of double aid payment. “The systems didn’t talk to each other, and we found out about it late,” Feldman said. “Because we have to stay in compliance with both the federal aid regulations and the athletic regulations, we did need to bill a handful of students a rather significant amount that they got overpaid.” In short, UC Berkeley needed the money back immediately or would risk diving in hot water with the federal government. If the campus is audited and students are found to be overawarded, it could jeopardize the campus aid program, making them ineligible to administer financial aid.

Getting screwed by the UC Berkeley financial aid office is a long and honored tradition of many a Cal grad, but wow, how do you end up being off by $11,000? Poor Grisom had to leave the team and now is paying it off in installments, but he had to leave the football team as a result.

It's a really sad story where no one (but particularly the administration) looks all that good, and poor Grisom has to bear the brunt of the mistakes of others.