OT: Wither UCLA? AD Is OUT- Athletics Out of Money
- Thread starter Knight Shift
- Start date
The UCLA athletic department situation mirrors the Rutgers situation.
1. Sports fans care about the many pro teams in the market, not the flagship state university's college teams
2. Student demographics are strong academically and the majority are in-state, Asian and Hispanic students who did not grow up following college sports
3. Athletic department spending is out of control
4. Joining the Big Ten worsened the financial situation when Big Ten membership was intended to improve the financial situation
5. A New AD is brought in with the impossible task of reducing the deficit by growing revenues
I'm curious what revenue levers UCLA expects to pull. The school already gets its full share of B1G media revenue money in 2025. UCLA renewed apparel deal with Nike this year. UCLA's attempt to relocate from the Rose Bowl to SoFi in hopes of generating more revenue was a spectacular flop.
Here is comparison of key numbers.
1. Sports fans care about the many pro teams in the market, not the flagship state university's college teams
2. Student demographics are strong academically and the majority are in-state, Asian and Hispanic students who did not grow up following college sports
3. Athletic department spending is out of control
4. Joining the Big Ten worsened the financial situation when Big Ten membership was intended to improve the financial situation
5. A New AD is brought in with the impossible task of reducing the deficit by growing revenues
I'm curious what revenue levers UCLA expects to pull. The school already gets its full share of B1G media revenue money in 2025. UCLA renewed apparel deal with Nike this year. UCLA's attempt to relocate from the Rose Bowl to SoFi in hopes of generating more revenue was a spectacular flop.
Here is comparison of key numbers.
I wonder how much not playing football at an on campus stadium hurts student attendance and then later alumni donations. USC has always been known for more alumni support.
This is a hard one to answer since UCLA has played off campus for 100 years.
Even in the 1980s when UCLA was a powerhouse, the Rose Bowl was half full.
Ticket sales and donations have been below the B1G average for the past decade at least. People in LA are not into college sports like people in most other B1G markets. Joining the B1G hasn't done much for UCLA. The stadium location doesn't help but this has been the case for a century and isn't going to change.
Similar situation to Rutgers.
Same as every school. More brand and sponsorship deals. That wasn't the AD's expertise. It's also different from Rutgers. Rutgers is the only P2 school in tri state area. UCLA is and always will be SC's little brother.
I actually was in the stands for the 1988 USC-UCLA game at the Rose Bowl (Troy Aikman). There were at least as many, if not more, USC fans in the stadium as UCLA. No home field advantage.
Again, very different from Rutgers. Their lack of an on campus stadium is a huge problem. For those that don't understand the dynamic, The Rose Bowl can be over an hour drive from Westwood. If it's a big game for them, getting inside to park makes it even longer. Tough ask of students. Outside of die hards and UCLA fans in the immediate area, it's very hard to get any consistent flow of fans to go to games. Rutgers having an oncampus stadium alleviates many of those issues. While we both have financial issues and are the state schools, Rutgers is in a more enviable position. The other issue they have is lack of land and serious facility issues. They make Rutgers look like Oregon.
Nice. Attendance record show 100,000+ for that game. But the attendance was less than half capacity for four home games in a season UCLA ranked #1 or #2 for six weeks.
Seems like the UCLA football situation, both on-the-field and financially, could be unfixable.
Rutgers spends waaay more on football than UCLA. Rutgers had been spending less, then 2.0 showed up and Rutgers spending skyrocketed, driven by coach pay.
Interesting point on land. Rutgers athletics has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to land in Piscataway and Edison.
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I don't think people understand how much land Rutgers has to build cathedrals of facilities. Those are the people that complain about parking on football game days lol
I would take it a step further. Looking at it from the standpoint of athletics, joining the B1G has done more damage than good to the Athletics bottom line at Rutgers. The deficit keeps growing even though the revenue from TV contracts has exploded. Now, there is a non-athletics tangential benefit in academics, but does that offset the continually growing athletic deficit?
UCLA had or has a weird Licensing Arrangement with their Logo:
UCLA finally has control over its logo, ending decades of madness
Rutgers has immense potential due to a few things:
Land
Population
Academic Reputation
In state talent
$$$ in tri state area - people and corporations
People complaining about parking here need to visit other places - there's plenty, even without Johnson Park being opened this year (which is ridiculous and needs to get fixed)
Land
Population
Academic Reputation
In state talent
$$$ in tri state area - people and corporations
People complaining about parking here need to visit other places - there's plenty, even without Johnson Park being opened this year (which is ridiculous and needs to get fixed)
Yup. And Rutgers athletics gets all that land for free. Plus, Rutgers is not subject to zoning and does its own building approvals and inspections, making Rutgers immune to the NIMBYism obstacles faced by most other universities.
Rutgers, if it had the money, could build basketball arena and football stadium on campus without have to buy land or deal with Piscataway or Middlesex County, which is not easy evidenced by the Johnson Park gameday parking situation. Contrast that to what UCLA would need to do to build a stadium in Westwood.
I'm amused too by how consumed Rutgers fans are about football parking. Scarlet Lot parking is below $100 for UMass and I'm tempted to park there and hoist some controversial banners to see what reaction it gets.
It would be impossible for UCLA to build anything substantial on campus. Pauley has history but it's a dump.
I believe they did some feasibility study and found they had the room to build a small ~30K stadium. LA City would make that impossible I guarantee it.
Nothing is unfixable. Winning makes all the difference to students, alums, local supporters. Location hardly matters.
How far do Utah fans travel to home games ?
Georgia, Florida, Tennessee ? Penn St ?
Pasadena is plenty close.
It can be an hour in traffic (more during rush hour). It's definitely not close to Westwood. Or for anyone who lives on the westside. Attendance starts with students. Students aren't going to the Rose Bowl in any real numbers from UCLA.
To win the B1G in football, UCLA and Rutgers both need a Cignetti-level coach and a billionaire donor who wants to sponsor the football team to show up at the same time. Odds of that happening are low.
Tarkanian, former UNLV coach said it best, "Only the Lakers were paid more than Woodens Bruins". Wooden was at ucla for about fifteen years, without winning anything, then all of a sudden wins ten in twelve years, after Gilbert comes & starts paying for everything from housing, cars, etc.
Sam Gilbert (1913 – November 23, 1987)[1] was an American businessman who owned a construction company in Los Angeles, California. He is best known as a controversial athletic booster of the UCLA Bruins men's basketball team from the mid-1960s until UCLA was ordered to disassociate from him in 1981.[1] He ran a money-laundering enterprise to finance the now-famous World Poker Tour tour stop called the Bicycle Casino, for which he was posthumously indicted in 1987. He was the husband of a well-known Los Angeles area teacher, Rose Gilbert.
Known as "Papa Sam" and "Papa G" to UCLA players, Gilbert began his relationship with UCLA basketball sometime around 1966–1967, when UCLA player Willie Naulls brought Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Lucius Allen to him for some counseling.[10] He opened up his Bel-Air, Los Angeles home to the players and became an advisor to many.[11][12] He bought clothes, cars, and even arranged abortions for players' girlfriends.[13]
Gilbert became the sports agent for the professional contracts of Alcindor, Allen, Sidney Wicks, Henry Bibby, Bill Walton and Swen Nater.[12][14][15] He and Los Angeles businessman Ralph Shapiro negotiated a $1.4 million contract for Alcindor with the Milwaukee Bucks at no charge to Alcindor.[10][16]
Coach Gene Bartow, who followed John Wooden as coach of the Bruin men's basketball team, felt his life was threatened by Gilbert. He thanked the NCAA in 1993 for not investigating the UCLA program in 1976.[17]
Following the death of UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan in 1980, Gilbert began to exert more influence on the UCLA basketball team. Coach Larry Brown "ran afoul" of Gilbert according to a 1988 Sports Illustrated article.[18]
Sam Gilbert (businessman) - Wikipedia
My California friends/hosts, East Coast origin, had crafted a beer pong table that could be set up on the hood of their car. Introduced beer pong to SoCal.
How hot is the women's gynastics coach ? ( asking for a guy who is not my friend)
Stop, Pauley has been renovated and is far from a dump. BTW your little brother has a 127 national titles, which is 11 more than SC has. UCLA has won the Crossover Cup last year by a wide margin. UCLA is a better school academically and in total athletics than SC. I do give SC a better football program. However, take out Pete Carrol's era (which was great) and SC has a winning % of 65% over the past 50 years. UCLA's is lower at 61%. Basically Pete's era was great, other than that SC has been average for 50 years.
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At least all the cross-country travel for meaningful matches in the chick sports and the non basketball/baseball and football dude sports is making their financial situation easier. Remember when their farthest travel was wazzu and UW and maybe Utah? If only there was a pacific regional conference that was P4 in structure. 
If those figures are correct, I think that might be the strongest argument I’ve ever seen for Rutgers abandoning FBS football. I am old enough to remember when we all thought getting into the big ten was going to have some huge financial payoff, when the reality is that it appears to have been an even bigger drain on the academic community than ever.
I‘ll continue to watch and root for Rutgers no matter what but I’d certainly understand if the BoG ever decide to end the Big Ten experiment.
And if students want to go using campus transportation they have to reserve ahead and pay for a shuttle that could take that long to get there. They make Rutgers logistics look like A+ material
LOL…no level of financial mismanagement will ever force the Boards to turn our Titanic around to join a league the university can compete in. Truth is, the program will Keep Diggin’ deeper deficits. Keep Choppin’ is a farcical and fantasy catch phrase that The Grifter knows full well is horse dung.
Joining the B1G steered toward the iceberg and the leaking $ gash gets bigger by the year. Soon it’ll be a cool $billion.
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Rutgers enters the X fray - Calling @Fat Koko :
Set against the Big Ten conference, which UCLA joined in 2024, fiscal 2025 looks like this:
Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database
www.cbssports.com
Set against the Big Ten conference, which UCLA joined in 2024, fiscal 2025 looks like this:
| Big Ten school | Donor contributions |
|---|---|
| Ohio State | $69.0 million |
| Penn State | $64.6 million |
| Washington | $52.9 million |
| Illinois | $50.7 million |
| Michigan | $50.4 million |
| Oregon | $33.2 million |
| UCLA | $13.5 million |
| Maryland | $11.3 million |
| Rutgers | $8.1 million |
Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database
Inside UCLA's money problem: Donors quit writing checks long before AD Martin Jarmond was fired
Despite a lucrative move to the Big Ten, donor giving, sponsorship revenue and fan support declined as UCLA's athletics deficit ballooned, helping set the stage for Jarmond's dismissal
www.cbssports.com
The Big Ten Catch-22
UCLA left the Pac-12 for money, and the money came, but everything else in the ledger seemingly fell.| Line | FY2023 (Pac-12) | FY2025 (Big Ten) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media and NCAA revenue | $41.2M | $77.3M | +88% |
| Ticket sales | $20.2M | $18.3M | –9% |
| Donor contributions | $15.6M | $13.5M | –14% |
| Sponsorship and licensing | $18.3M | $10.6M | –42% |
| Game expenses and travel | $24.2M | $33.1M | +36% |
| Non-coaching staff pay | $23.6M | $31.8M | +35% |
| Coaches pay | $30.9M | $33.0M | +7% |
Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database
Rutgers enters the X fray - Calling @Fat Koko :
Set against the Big Ten conference, which UCLA joined in 2024, fiscal 2025 looks like this:
Big Ten school Donor contributions Ohio State $69.0 million Penn State $64.6 million Washington $52.9 million Illinois $50.7 million Michigan $50.4 million Oregon $33.2 million UCLA $13.5 million Maryland $11.3 million Rutgers $8.1 million
Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database
Inside UCLA's money problem: Donors quit writing checks long before AD Martin Jarmond was fired
Despite a lucrative move to the Big Ten, donor giving, sponsorship revenue and fan support declined as UCLA's athletics deficit ballooned, helping set the stage for Jarmond's dismissal
Rutgers enters the X fray - Calling @Fat Koko :
Set against the Big Ten conference, which UCLA joined in 2024, fiscal 2025 looks like this:
Big Ten school Donor contributions Ohio State $69.0 million Penn State $64.6 million Washington $52.9 million Illinois $50.7 million Michigan $50.4 million Oregon $33.2 million UCLA $13.5 million Maryland $11.3 million Rutgers $8.1 million
Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database
Inside UCLA's money problem: Donors quit writing checks long before AD Martin Jarmond was fired
Despite a lucrative move to the Big Ten, donor giving, sponsorship revenue and fan support declined as UCLA's athletics deficit ballooned, helping set the stage for Jarmond's dismissal
Not sure why I got mentioned but note that billionaire John Arnold gets to the identical UCLA athletics deficit I posted on TKR a few hours before John's tweet. And his Rutgers deficit calculation matches mine too.
The Cbs Sports article John linked to in his tweet mentions a leak of UCLA NIL data. If anybody wants this info, send me a PM and I will email the documents to you.
Thanks for sharing! Validates my numbers when some, including Tate and Keli, try to argue the Rutgers athletics deficit isn’t really the deficit and blame accounting rules instead.
TKR posters (here, here) often answer something like other schools record athletics expenses, such as facilities costs, on the university's books while Rutgers honestly reports them. The opposite is true.
For example, compare how UCLA and Rutgers reported facilities maintenance and repairs in 2025.
UCLA spent $9,248,503 on athletics facilities and repairs in 2025. Rutgers spent zero which is impossible. Other notables: LSU $5,887,129, Penn State $9,641,756.
To be sure, for some amounts - how media rights are allocated across sports, for example - can reasonably be done differently across schools. However, the case that Rutgers athletics financials suffer from other schools' aggressive accounting is inaccurate.
Talking to Keli, the sheer waste under the last administration was abominable. Cleaning that up, along with a focus and strategy on branding/sponsorship deals is the best the dept. can do. The rest has to come from fans. Like most schools, Rutgers sports are highly unlikely to ever turn a profit or even be self sustaining. That's a fools errand. As it should be.
Any examples beyond the obvious at the football program? Spending went from $84 million to $193 million with Hobbs, with only three conference champions to show for it.
Scarlet Knight Enterprises has 20 employees and a lame website. Five people there have "corporate partnerships" in their titles, four more have "brand partnerships," then SKE has Keli, Knisley, Oliver, and the new guy Fred, yet Rutgers can't get a jersey patch deal for the football season and the apparel deal is terrible and locked in for at least 5 years.
The apparel deal was Hobbs. Can't blame that on Keli or SKE.
The lack of a jersey patch deal is a head scratcher, and maybe they are holding out for a better deal?
Hobbs screwed up the apparel supplier relationships badly, which is especially dumb when he was dealing with a duopoly of Nike and Adidas who don't want or need Rutgers business.
Keli signed the apparel deal with Nike in March 2026, 18 months after Hobbs left. Tate signed the Nike deal at LSU. The Keli-Tate might have been able to salvage something better.
Is is not reallydebatable whether Zinn and/or Tate could have negotiated a better deal.
This is at least the second time this has been rehashed. The deal was announced in December 2014 and official on July 1, 2025 BEFORE Keli Zinn was hired:
Rutgers Athletics expected to sign new apparel contract with Nike - Page 3 - Forums
Did USC do better than Rutgers?
Rutgers, Zinn and Pres. Tate would have looked foolish trying to renegotiate in 2026 when the deal was "done" and there was performance by both parties. And I have no idea what Pres. Tate signing an LSU agreement has anything to do with Rutgers' agreement.
Rutgers basically backed themselves into a corner, and even if they wanted to "renegotiate," what was their next best alternative for a position of strength? Go to Dick's or the Sports Authority and hire a local screen printer?
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