HoopDreams said:

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you're right!

this is exactly what I wanted to know

basically almost no schools comply with it, although schools with more women's sports could more legitimately claim prong 3

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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calfanz said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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BearGoggles said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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calfanz said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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What is your proposed solution for cutting sports given that Cal is apparently complying with Title IX by expanding opportunity?

Seems to me Cal won't be able to cut sports unless/until football players become employees (which I presume will remove from Title IX) and/or there is federal legislation to address this. But I could be wrong.

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dimitrig said:

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BearGoggles said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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calfanz said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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What is your proposed solution for cutting sports given that Cal is apparently complying with Title IX by expanding opportunity?

Seems to me Cal won't be able to cut sports unless/until football players become employees (which I presume will remove from Title IX) and/or there is federal legislation to address this. But I could be wrong.

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I say cut all sports except baseball/softball, basketball, football, swimming, soccer, and water polo.

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BearGoggles said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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calfanz said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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What is your proposed solution for cutting sports given that Cal is apparently complying with Title IX by expanding opportunity?

Seems to me Cal won't be able to cut sports unless/until football players become employees (which I presume will remove from Title IX) and/or there is federal legislation to address this. But I could be wrong.

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BearSD said:

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HoopDreams said:

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you're right!

this is exactly what I wanted to know

basically almost no schools comply with it, although schools with more women's sports could more legitimately claim prong 3

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Right. Cal, along with many other universities, has an agreement with the feds that amounts to the federal government saying: You are not in compliance with Title IX, but as long you show that you are making more of an effort than you did in the past, we won't declare you in violation and impose penalties on you.

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movielover said:

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This all assumes women are as equally interested in sports as men.

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Big Dog said:

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BearSD said:

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HoopDreams said:

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you're right!

this is exactly what I wanted to know

basically almost no schools comply with it, although schools with more women's sports could more legitimately claim prong 3

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Right. Cal, along with many other universities, has an agreement with the feds that amounts to the federal government saying: You are not in compliance with Title IX, but as long you show that you are making more of an effort than you did in the past, we won't declare you in violation and impose penalties on you.

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I'm not sure that is entirely correct.


Colleges can be in compliance under any of the 3 prongs. Sure, the ideal is Prong 1, but the regs clearly allow compliance using Prong 2 or Prong 3. The fact that the latter two are a little more squishy and subject to interpretation -- like nearly every regulation -- doesn't mean that the schools are not in compliance.

The Unis file their reports claiming compliance and the feds then decide whether to accept the reports as 'in-compliance'. Or not.

Of course, the downside with using Prong 2 or Prong 3, it'll be hard to argue you are still compliance if you cut just one woman's sport.

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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What is your proposed solution for cutting sports given that Cal is apparently complying with Title IX by expanding opportunity?

Seems to me Cal won't be able to cut sports unless/until football players become employees (which I presume will remove from Title IX) and/or there is federal legislation to address this. But I could be wrong.

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I say cut all sports except baseball/softball, basketball, football, swimming, soccer, and water polo.

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How is that title ix compliant under current laws/regulations when football is 85 scholarships?

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BearGoggles said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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calfanz said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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What is your proposed solution for cutting sports given that Cal is apparently complying with Title IX by expanding opportunity?

Seems to me Cal won't be able to cut sports unless/until football players become employees (which I presume will remove from Title IX) and/or there is federal legislation to address this. But I could be wrong.

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BearGoggles said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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BearGoggles said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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calfanz said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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What is your proposed solution for cutting sports given that Cal is apparently complying with Title IX by expanding opportunity?

Seems to me Cal won't be able to cut sports unless/until football players become employees (which I presume will remove from Title IX) and/or there is federal legislation to address this. But I could be wrong.

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I'm not an athletic administrator who is getting paid 6 figures, in one case 7 figures, to figure that out, so I don't have an answer to that except for this. I would call several of the many many programs who have football and who cut sports and ask how all of them accomplished this task that we think is impossible.

We use the excuse that Cal is different way more often than is warranted. Cal is mostly different because it chooses to be. When we look at Mark Fox and see his abysmal performance compared to his peers, we don't ask critics how they would coach the team differently and we don't give him the excuse that he is at Cal. We call for his ass to be fired because he is the one that is supposed to know how to fix it. Cal's athletic administration is a mass of bloated incompetence, whataboutism, misrepresentation, and excuses. I can't accept their word that things can't be done at Cal when everyone else manages to do them.

They've had longer than my lifetime to fix things and they make it worse every year. I'm done with them.

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That's a lot of words when you could have just stopped after "I don't have an answer" to solving the Title IX issues.

Reportedly, it is Christ (and by extension Knowlton) who don't want to cut sports. Like you, I disagree with that. But if Christ is willing to keep stroking checks for $20-30M I guess that's her prerogative - the next chancellor will deal with it I suppose.

FWIW I do agree with you about gross mismanagement/incompetence in the Cal AD and above. The problem is a lack of commitment to excellence/winning. If that was the metric and goal, the rest (including cutting sports) would fall into place most likely. That is how Cal is "different" than a place like Oregon or USC - not in a good way.

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Big Dog said:

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No high school teams in the state?

https://www.kgw.com/article/sports/oregon-high-school-gymnasts-rely-on-club-teams/283-295296124

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Big Dog said:

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BearGoggles said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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wifeisafurd said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Big Dog said:

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calfanz said:

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philly1121 said:

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Breaking: UC Regents agree to let UCLA go with a possible $2-5 million subsidy once new media deal is finalized. Money is to go to student/athlete support programs.

Less subsidy/tax than I thought but completely in line with what I thought and said would happen.

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Yeah, letting UCLA go with some kind of subsidy (depending on the media deal) seemed like the most likely outcome.

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I guarantee you it won't take long before they are humiliating us over the fact that they are subsidizing our athletics.

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If you barely care why have you posted >10,000 words in the last week?

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Barely care about Cal sports. Very much care about Cal and how the mismanagement of Cal sports has moved from just damaging Cal sports to damaging the actual university. And believe me I understand that there is a tiny, tiny percentage of alums who make up an outsized percentage here who just want to win at any cost (which won't happen no matter what we pay) and don't want anyone to bring up the fact that Cal athletics is losing an egregious amount of money.

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You do understand that winning in the Revenue sports will help reduce that debt; in contrast, losing will only make it worse?

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You do realize that everyone is trying to win and spending more money doesn't mean you win. For god's sake you guys say the same thing for 50 years. Throw more money at it, Cal will stop being Cal, we will win, and we will be profitable. What we have done is spent a lot more money than we used to and lost a lot more than we used to.

What is the dollar amount we can spend, still lose, and your solution won't be to spend more. $200M? $1 billion? Seriously we are losing astronomical amounts and not winning. Where is the limit?

We can cut football in half and not lose more. We can literally spend zero on basketball and not lose more.

TV money is going to drop precipitously. Attendance has dropped up and down the coast and in most cases, including our most analogous school, UCLA, winning hasn't solved it.

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Actually, TV money is not gonna drop "precipitously" from last year. The current Larry Scott pac deal is crap, so the new p10 deal may even be an increase over current money. (But yeah, $$ may drop precipitously from what was hoped with a new p12 deal including the SoCal schools.)

Football makes money. (It could make more.). The Stadium retrofit is a sunk cost. The only way to lessen the pain of the bill is to put more butts in the seats of the Rev sports, i.e., become competitive. (Attendance drops bcos we have a non-competitive team on the field/court.)

But we could still lose less overall by eliminating some non-rev sports. UCLA offers 25 to our 30.

Private and rich Stanford* has 36;, but USC only funds 21. U-Dub ~20; Oregon has 18.

But if you don't want to compete for league titles, we could also lose less by just hiring up and coming young coaches on the cheap. No reason to guarantee millions.

(numbers approximate based on quick google search)

*Stanford loves to win the Director's Cup, but even so, current Prez has indicated an interest in cutting their non-rev sports.

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We agree on a lot. Disagree on some.

1. I have been saying for decades that Cal needs to cut sports. Frankly, more than 5. Every sport should be required to be self sufficient and in the case of men's sports, that means funding whatever women's sports need to be funded to fulfill the Title IX obligations created by that sport. I could see an exception if the sport is bringing some prestige value to the university (like swimming) but I believe all sports that would qualify for that are also self funding.

2.Cal should be hiring up and coming coaches on the cheap. They used to do that with mixed results. They now pay more with worse results. They also have to stop being taken for a ride on extensions. I am not a Wilcox hater, but I don't believe he is worth what we pay him either to us or on the open market. He did not earn the extension he received. There was simply no reason to pay him more or increase our commitment to him. If he can go get more somewhere else, let him go.

3. Regarding "Football makes money", I agree, but that isn't as obvious as it sounds. I'm sorry, you can't just say the stadium is sunk cost and pretend like that cost doesn't exist. Athletics already attributes a fair amount of the cost of the SAHPC to athletics generally. Pretty much everything the university is paying was only spent because of football. If you add that in, on paper football is at best breaking even. Now, I there is money attributed on the non-specific program category, both in revenue and expenses, that I think is probably really football, and I would bet a lot more on the revenue side than expense. So yes. Football makes money. But, football is not making the gobs of money people think, and there is simply nothing in our history that says that under any circumstances you can make Cal football earn the $30M more than it already makes that it would have to in order to wipe out the ever growing deficits. In the last non-Covid year reported, Cal's ticket sales were $6.5M and its direct contributions were $1.6M+. Nonspecific contributions were a little less than $6.8M and I'm willing to attribute all of that to football for argument's sake (because most of it probably is attributed to football). If you look at our historical numbers, you can maybe make a really bad argument that Cal could maybe squeak another $12M if we duplicated the Tedford years. That would be an argument that ignores the fact that ticket sales and contributions are down everywhere over the last decade, even more on the west coast, and winning at Stanford didn't make a dent in the problem there nor did it at UCLA.

4. Let's be clear, I agree that athletic department resources (whatever those should be) should be devoted first and foremost to football because nothing else, including basketball, is going to make a difference.

5. That said, it is absolutely not clear that spending more on football is going to yield higher profits. Spending $50M to make $55M is not better than spending $40M to make $50M. There is a point for every school where they have maximized your net gain. I'm going to invent a term here to draw an analogy to the the stadium cost. Sunk revenue. Just like the debt isn't going to change no matter what Cal does, about 2/3 of the football revenue isn't going to change because it is in things that aren't impacted by performance - conference payouts, media rights, existing endowments, etc. Cal gets that money by showing up. There is maybe $15M in revenue, (maybe you can squeeze that number to $20M depending on some of the non specific categories) that are not "sunk revenue". There is only so much Cal can increase that, and it isn't $30M. So the question isn't whether football is making money. It is whether spending another $1M in a certain way will lead to $1M + $1 in revenue. Depends on what you spend it for. I'm going to tell you right now that Wilcox's salary is not paying for itself. Cal easily could have paid $3M for head coach and have it not impact revenue whatsoever. And when you look at the financial statements we ARE increasing expenses toward football (not including debt service) and the non "sunk revenue" is going down. I'm not convinced that spending more money, the way Cal is going to spend it is going to lead to a net increase in revenue. And that became harder when they extended Wilcox.

6. That is not to say football is the primary problem. It just isn't the panacea solution some thing it is. Cal can't close $30M deficits by just investing in football. There needs to be significant cost cutting.

7. And ultimately, I don't care how they do it. If they cut every sport but required conference sports, fine. If they can make $100M in revenue from Fortnite, fine by me. $20M checks from the campus have got to stop. They need to spend better, not more.

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This is a theoretical discussion about football, and a fairly naive one. The reality is that donors will be moving their money towards NIL or directed funds to be able to fund competitive teams and pay coaches, which removes a large potion of discretionary funding away from athletic departments. How much coaches and players make will be donor driven. Then there is the NLRLB and Penn State cases which will turn football players into employees for many schools and ultimately most experts think collective bargaining, which means a huge change in income moving from athletic departments to players.

The current model is that football funds deficits in other non-revenue sports. All these sports help fund students and school overhead. A school like Cal would have to fund 500 to 600 students every year and also have to pay for a bunch of overhead that they take out in fees from every donation to sports, which means the concept about deficits is insanely naive because the school ends up net losing money way above the deficits if sports go away, and then there is the inability to attract donors to campus for sporting events or the school to get its brand out there. But that model starts falling apart when a significant amount of money goes to pay players in a competitive bargaining environment.

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The concept of the money just being there because people think that football just makes a lot of money and drives a lot of donations so we just ignore numbers is naive. Football DOES make a lot of money and DOES drive a lot of donations, but what does "a lot" mean.

1. Cal does not need football to get its brand out there. Most of its peers do not use football to get its brand out there. The number of kids who go to Cal because they heard of Cal through football is so small to be irrelevant. (not that I don't see the benefit. I do)

2. When the campus is putting in $5M a year on sports, I'm not disputing the claim that we lose more "if sports go away". At $30M+, I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to actually show some numbers for that. The year before Cal opened the stadium, total donations for sports was $13M. The year the stadium opened it was $26M, I assume because of the required donations to get most season tickets. Since then it has dropped every year until it is at $15M now. (It is actually at $12M, but $15M is the last non Covid year reported so I think that is the most fair year to look at right now). Sports other than football and basketball lost $27M in 2019 and that does not include $19M in athletic department administration (which is in addition to the football and basketball admin expense). Total donations INCLUDING FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL were $15M. I'm struggling to see how cutting a bunch of unpopular sports, that alums don't fund, that alums don't go to, is going to lead to a net loss other than that is what some athletic administrators who don't want to lose their jobs say when this comes up. Quite frankly, if you cut everything but the conference required sports, the numbers scream that you would save a lot of money. (and to be clear, you shouldn't do that because there are some sports that would be a net loss to cut. Which points out all the more that the other sports are a huge drag)

3. The overhead argument just doesn't account for any significant part of the losses. Cal funds a majority of the student's cost through tuition, very little of which on average is funded by Cal. The amount of athletic donations offsetting that is a fraction. The amount of athletic donations funding the overhead for those students that come from unpopular, unfunded sports is basically zero. The funds that those sports are putting in are not even funding the basic administration and costs of the team, let alone the students on the team.

4. I never said to cut football and your comments about alums directing funds is exactly what I said should happen. If students value sports, they should voluntarily vote for an added fee on their tuition. If alums value sports, they should donate. My argument from the beginning has been that our students and alums just do not value sports, at least not with their money, like other programs do, and they either need to step up, or we need to plan accordingly. In 2019, football had $2.6M in donations. There were $7.3M in non-directed donations to the athletic department. So if ALL of that gets directed to coaches salary and NIL, and another few million in endowment income. Even if all of that is applied to football, it isn't close to cutting it. (Barely covers the current coaching costs). So the whales need to step up or this isn't going anywhere. And your comments about competitive bargaining are spot on and is part of what I'm saying. People here are assuming that it is like it was in 2001 and ignore that the landscape has already changed dramatically and is going to change even more. And worse, Cal locking us in to Wilcox and Knowlton's contracts when they didn't need to do it further limits Cal's ability to nimbly respond to whatever happens.

5. The bottom line is the campus can't keep throwing checks at sports and they have warned the sports and alums about this for 15 years. If alums want this to happen, they need to step up. If they don't, hell, that is fine, but you can't expect students and taxpayers to keep paying for it. If no one wants to pay for it, we have our answer. If no one is willing to put up the dollars for a sport, who are we doing it for? The university has been hitting this drumbeat for years, and now they are explicitly calling out things like NIL. They are giving the message loud and clear. Alums need to respond. I just don't see it happening. I hope I'm wrong.

6. When we are talking about this level of losses, it is no longer acceptable to put out subjective statements about general economic benefit. If general fund donations are tied to football, show it. At least with some analysis. If it is offsetting other university costs, show it. I'm going to be quite frank. I don't believe Cal and UCLA would put out public statements that make sports look in more financial dire straits than they are.

7. And my general point was primarily that the view that football can just fix everything just doesn't cut it when you look at the numbers. It can't. And the future will only make that harder.

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Donors that fund football contribute several hundred million dollars to campus every year, in case you are wondering what actually is at stake, That doesn't even discuss, for example, alums of baseball and rugby who are major donors. Cal went though this before and Campus lost a lot of money when teams were cut. It is real funny how a Chancellor's principles takes a back seat when faculty are having their research funding or endowments pulled.

Most athletic departments in the Pac are running huge deficits due to C-19. Cal isn't even close to the top. There is UCLA, WSU, Oregon, Furd, etc. with larger annual deficits. That obviously will change the more we move away from C-19, but other changes will remove money from athletics in the long run.

Before C-19 only 13 P5 schools, had more than $25 million in deficits annually. Cal had the worse in the Pac due to interest expanse (e.g, 17 million deficit in 2017), about 55% of which has been transferred to Campus. Christ set 2020 as a deadline to balance the athletics budget, which was close to being achieved, but then came the two C-19 years.

In the current NIL/players are employees environment, everyone probably is going to have to belt tighten and I see no way around cutting a huge number of teams if players have to be paid. The programs that make the mov earlier will be in a better competitive position, but right now that is not the view of Christ, who believes that tams should be cut as a last resort. The prior experience likely shapes her views.

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When did Cal ever cut a sport. They threatened to cut America's past time and the winningest program at the school and then didn't.

No Cal was not almost balanced or even improving before Covid.

In 2017, Cal ran a $16M deficit, which was actually progress because the prior two years they had run a $21M deficit.

In 2018, it was back up to $19M

In 2019, the last full year before Covid, it was STILL $19M except Cal had moved $11M of the debt service off the athletic department's books. We were not close to balancing the athletic department budget, we had by far our worst fiscal year ever when you consider the new treatment of the debt service. And this was also with Cal giving the athletic department the biggest "direct institutional support" that it had given to that point.

In 2020, partially impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting a $20M increase in "direct institutional support".

In 2021, much more impacted by Covid, the athletic department "balanced the budget" by getting $20M in "direct institutional support" and an as yet unexplained $19M one time revenue line item (which I'm still hoping/assuming is a generous donor bailing them out, recognizing a difficult situation.

Covid does not account for the issue. In the most impacted year, 2021, Cal lost about $28M in ticket sales, contributions, media rights, and licensing vs. 2019. Overall, their revenues were down $32M. That was then made up for with $15M more in increased direct institutional support and the $19M in the one time revenue line item. Except that doesn't account for the fact that they saved $18.5M on the expense side almost entirely due to Covid. Football expenses alone were down $11M. These are not recurring savings. So Covid cost them net about $14M, and somehow they got $19M to offset that. If you account for all the Covid losses and savings, the added contribution from the university and one time revenue hit, 2019's bottom line is virtually the same as 2021. And it is basically the same over several years. Cal is losing $15M-$20M if you don't count the debt service the university has taken on, $25M-$30M if you do. It isn't getting better.


Oregon didn't come close to our deficits last year. If somehow you want to count pre-contributions, yeah, but that would be the whole point since our alums are getting what they pay for. WSU balanced their budget last year. No idea on Stanford.


I never said to cut football, so the point about what donor's fund at the university level isn't relevant to what I said, but it is relevant to the fact that we keep just getting big statements thrown out there with no backing.

In 2021, Cal raised $880M, much of which does not come from individuals or alums. So you are telling me that 90% of Cal's donations are contingent on football? (and there is a big difference from saying donors to the school also donate to football and saying donors to the school would withhold money due to football)

And this doesn't make sense for 3 reasons.

1. If they were giving several hundred million dollars a year, and they view football as a priority to the extent that they will stop giving several hundred million dollars a year, they would just divert 5% of their annual giving to athletics and wipe out the entire athletic department debt. It would make no sense for either the donors who want the money spent on sports, or the school who looks bad writing checks to sports, for this not to happen.

2. What are they? Morons? We've sucked for 45 out of the last 60 years. What horror could we do to football that we haven't already done that would make them say NOW we aren't supporting it enough?

3. If they wanted football financially supported, they would financially support it. They wouldn't give several hundred million dollars to the school and hope that they pass a few crumbs down to athletics based on vague threats. They didn't get rich that way.

Which is not to say I don't think cutting football would hurt donations. It would, which is partially why I wouldn't cut it, which is what I said, so I don't know why this keeps coming back to football. But the university is not going to lose several hundred million dollars over football. If it were, I guarantee you we would be a top 10 program right now because if we were going to lose several hundred million over coming in 12th instead of 10th, think what we would gain by coming in 1st. (and by the way, there has been pretty much no correlation at Cal between success in football and donor giving to the general fund).

But to the actual point, you are going to tell me every sport at Cal is tied to a donor who is going to walk if we cut that sport. That somehow Cal has to stand out as having more sports than the large majority of schools or this school that is known for elite academics and whose students go to the school almost entirely for academics, that school, its donors are going to say, sorry, no field hockey and academics can go to hell.

Oregon has 18 sports. The cost of their admin staff is significantly less than ours. Their coaching salary expense is virtually the same, except we spend $11M on football and basketball coaches and they spend $17M while we spread the difference to a bunch of sports no one cares about. Their alumni contributions dwarf ours. (Yes, I know they have Phil Knight, but it is pretty clear their normal contributions dwarf ours) Maybe if we had 18 sports and diverted the excess money to football, we would at least be in a better position right now.

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What is your proposed solution for cutting sports given that Cal is apparently complying with Title IX by expanding opportunity?

Seems to me Cal won't be able to cut sports unless/until football players become employees (which I presume will remove from Title IX) and/or there is federal legislation to address this. But I could be wrong.

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Cal could eliminate men's sports with zero impact on T9. Of course, eliminating men's golf doesn't save much money. And Rugby (men's and women's) is already self-funded so no savings there -- just p-off the current donors, who also donate to General Fund. Baseball was trying to get self-funded, but haven't heard how the fundraising is going.

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Bobodeluxe said:

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This site has arrived at Mars long before elon has.

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movielover said:

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Yup, 'diversity'.

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Bobodeluxe said:

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Was on campus during the graduation ceremonies yesterday. I would venture that the present student body has very little interest in traditional Murkun sports.

Just a wild guess.

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dimitrig said:

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Bobodeluxe said:

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This site has arrived at Mars long before elon has.

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I think Elon beat us.

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BearSD said:

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dimitrig said:

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Bobodeluxe said:

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This site has arrived at Mars long before elon has.

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I think Elon beat us.

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Elon will never get there as long as he is spending the bulk of his time tweeting and banning twitter users who annoy him.

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This is quite a prediction from @Ourand_SBJ on Pac-12's media deal. (And he's never wrong.)

Would not be keen if a Pac-12 fan.https://t.co/SUoUIRwuLg pic.twitter.com/z2k3veUPKB

— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) December 19, 2022