If Regents Ready UCLA decides, emails show little public support

Within hours of the stunning news last summer that UCLA was running out of the Pac-12 conference, along with the University of Southern California, for a rich Big Ten media contract, emails began pouring into the inbox of UCLA’s athletic director, Martin Jarmond, to review.

“I’m glad my dad didn’t go through this,” wrote Class of ’96 Brian Birkenstein, who didn’t miss a home football game as a college student. “This move just testifies to the hypocritical values ​​UCLA clearly has,” wrote Class of ’88 Eugene Chiang, who added that he would no longer be a fan, donor, or advocate. “I graduated from UCLA 50 years ago and have NEVER been ashamed of my alma mater…until today!” wrote Jerry Macy, class of ’72.

The same was true of Chancellor Gene D. Block’s inbox.

“It feels like the gap between student and athlete has widened even further,” Tal Johnson, a UCLA parent, wrote to the Chancellor. “Legacy and geography, and the relationship with alumni, is more important than TV money in my opinion,” wrote Sean J. Mulvihill, a physician who was doing his residency at UCLA

In the nearly four dozen angry emails sent to the athletic director or the chancellor in the immediate aftermath of the June 30 announcement, the move was largely, at times less than politely, condemned as a short-sighted, tradition-ignoring money grab.

The sample size may be too small to assess the opposition of the move. Yet it is telling how few emails obtained by The New York Times through a public records request supported this.

The handful of notes congratulating Jarmond, the athletic director, appeared to come from UCLA employees or from people he’d met over a dozen years while working in the Big Ten at Michigan State and Ohio State.

As the University of California Board of Regents prepares to vote Wednesday on whether to block UCLA’s move to the Big Ten, those few congratulatory emails Jarmond received seem instructive in another way. In the nearly six months since the proposed move was announced, there hasn’t been much visible enthusiasm for it.

In a survey of UCLA athletes conducted for the Regents, only 35 percent of 111 respondents said they thought the move was a good idea. (Only about one in six athletes even responded to the survey.) Bill Walton, one of UCLA’s most renowned former athletes, has urged the Regents to reject the move.

So is another former UCLA athlete, the football player Ramogi Huma. As executive director of the National College Players Association, an athlete advocacy group, he told the Regents in a letter last week that increased travel to distant campuses in Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey would place a greater burden on black male athletes. , whose college graduation rates are about 50 percent, compared to 73 percent for black male students overall at UCLA

The move has also caught the attention of Nancy Skinner, a state legislator who is considering introducing legislation that would place stricter limits on the time athletes in California schools spend practicing, playing and traveling for their sport.

So while there’s been a steady stream of opposition, there’s barely been a drop of organized public support for UCLA’s move — or any prominent athletes who’ve been instrumental in pushing it.

Unlike, say, when Rutgers joined the Big Ten nearly a decade ago, the administrative zeal isn’t so much about a path to relevance—UCLA’s women’s soccer team recently captured the school’s 120th NCAA championship—as it is about financial pragmatism.

The increased revenue is one way UCLA, whose athletic department deficit has soared to $103.1 million, according to the school’s income and expense statement, can afford a broad-based athletic program that receives little financial support from the university.

Block and Jarmond have been largely silent, apart from addressing the Regents, sometimes in private, to make their case for the move. Block apologized to Ana Mari Cauce, the president of the University of Washington, for not informing them beforehand, calling the move “personally agonizing”. according to a letter obtained by The Athletic through a request for public records.

At a Sports Business Journal conference in Las Vegas last week, Jarmond urged athletics executives to “have better communication with people who don’t understand our business.”

When Jarmond was asked afterwards why UCLA had not received much public support for the move, he declined to comment.

When the jump to the Big Ten was announced this summer, there was little indication that UCLA needed support. It was considered a fait accompli, as chancellors in the University of California system, which has 10 campuses, have been given wide discretion in the management of their campuses for decades.

But the regents began asking questions because UCLA’s departure would result in a financial blow to a sister school, the University of California, Berkeley. The revenue from a Pac-12 television contract would be cut by millions of dollars because the conference would lose the Los Angeles market.

It also didn’t help UCLA that many of the regents — including Governor Gavin Newsom — were angry at being kept in the dark about such an important issue.

Then, in August, the regents were informed by their general counsel, Charles Robinson, that while they had delegated authority to the chancellors, they had not relinquished it.

In subsequent meetings, in September and November, the Regents urged UCLA to get answers about how membership in the Big Ten would help financially and the impact it would have on the health of athletes and academics. UCLA said it expected to bring in $60 million to $70 million a year in television revenue when it joined the Big Ten for the 2024-25 school year, about double what it brings in from its membership in the Pac-12 .

That annual revenue would be offset by about $10 million in new expenses for travel and nutritional, academic and mental health support, the university said.

But the Regents are struggling to understand what would happen if UCLA stayed in the Pac-12. Although George Kliavkoff, the Pac-12 Commissioner, has urged the Regents to block UCLA’s move, he has failed to secure a television rights deal to provide them with a firm comparison.

(The Big 12 recently agreed to a media rights deal worth $31.7 million per school per year, seen as a loose target for where the Pac-12 – with no presence in the Los Angeles market – will land .)

While the Pac-12 negotiated with the likes of ESPN and Amazon, the belt tightened across the industry as the year drew to a close.

According to Nielsen Media Research, which tracks television ratings, ESPN and ESPN2 subscribers were down 7 percent since January, while ESPNU was down 12 percent. Fox Sports’ cable channels, FS1 and FS2, lost 6 percent and 11 percent of their subscribers. And the Big Ten Network, the most widely distributed conference channel, lost 9 percent of its subscribers.

Kliavkoff expects the Pac-12 to complete his new contract in the first half of 2023.

While the regents were collecting information, many of them hoped that the problem would solve itself. One option they’re considering, but haven’t considered yet, is to allow UCLA to leave, but demand that Berkeley be compensated for lost revenue.

While the regents have raised questions about whether UCLA’s departure will create new problems while current ones are resolved, some on the board have expressed displeasure with a decision being reversed because of the precedent it would set.

In the end, even as the Regents walk out of Wednesday’s meeting after clearing one final obstacle to UCLA’s move to the Big Ten, they may share one overriding feeling: little enthusiasm for it.