Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

Gunga la Gunga said:

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Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

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Yes, if only we could think of a way to fill the stadium. I wonder what that could possibly be? Oh I know how about having an interesting and dynamic team that people want to watch? That might be worth a try.

That is of course the entire point of this thesis. We need to create a winning product. Once we do that we fill the stadium. It does not work in reverse. This is like the people who want to make a donation to Cal Football once it goes to the Rose Bowl and only then.

Chicken and the egg people

What you said: Off topic, but personally, I think where college sports has arrived and where it is heading, I think colleges should just license their name to a professional business who runs football and basketball. I don't think it even matters anymore if the players are students. Offer an education if you want. Don't if you don't. Just pay them to wear the laundry and let's stop pretending this has anything to do with student athletics.

I've been saying this for awhile now, and agree with it. Let's stop trying to run minor league NFL programs in our universities. Turn em loose, let em run things as needed, and pay a franchise/rent fee back to the University for the privilege of wearing the unis. And oh by the way, let em seek tie-ins with NFL franchises for additional support. After all, it's not like the NFL isn't benefitting from a "free" minor league system.

LarsBear74 said:

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What you said: Off topic, but personally, I think where college sports has arrived and where it is heading, I think colleges should just license their name to a professional business who runs football and basketball. I don't think it even matters anymore if the players are students. Offer an education if you want. Don't if you don't. Just pay them to wear the laundry and let's stop pretending this has anything to do with student athletics.

I've been saying this for awhile now, and agree with it. Let's stop trying to run minor league NFL programs in our universities. Turn em loose, let em run things as needed, and pay a franchise/rent fee back to the University for the privilege of wearing the unis. And oh by the way, let em seek tie-ins with NFL franchises for additional support. After all, it's not like the NFL isn't benefitting from a "free" minor league system.

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This. And it will get worse. I really hope that those that are committed to "relevance" have thought about that step - players getting paid.

https://www.usnews.com/news/sports/articles/2023-01-17/us-appeals-court-to-hear-ncaa-case-over-pay-for-athletes

That really is the logical end game. And that triggers a myrida of challenges and, while the NCAA loves crying wolf I do agree that it would fundamentally change the landscape for ALL students. I don't see how universities, serving the majority of students, carve out an activity highly subsidized and exclusive that doesn't benefit the vast majority of attendees.

THis has been a facinating thread but gosh it is also depressing. The need to come up with 30M ANNUALLY to get the AD toward competitive balance is daunting. And of course we haven't yet talked about structural issues on the academic side of the equation that make Cal also uncompetive - for example, if you want to compete in the modern landscape you better be able to offer majors OFTEN (not always but often) of interest to high performance athletes: Sports Marking and pysical therapy being 2. Oh yeah, majors not avaliable at Cal.

Sebastabear said:

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Gunga la Gunga said:

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Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

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Yes, if only we could think of a way to fill the stadium. I wonder what that could possibly be? Oh I know how about having an interesting and dynamic team that people want to watch? That might be worth a try.

That is of course the entire point of this thesis. We need to create a winning product. Once we do that we fill the stadium. It does not work in reverse. This is like the people who want to make a donation to Cal Football once it goes to the Rose Bowl and only then.

Chicken and the egg people

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Does Wilcox understand this? I'm being serious. Does he know that the absolutely boring program he leads is hampering his efforts to have a winning program? Does he know that his conservative tendencies on offense and defense keep fans from being excited and that that is a harm to his program?
Is he aware of any of this?

89Bear said:

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Sebastabear said:

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Gunga la Gunga said:

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Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

---

Yes, if only we could think of a way to fill the stadium. I wonder what that could possibly be? Oh I know how about having an interesting and dynamic team that people want to watch? That might be worth a try.

That is of course the entire point of this thesis. We need to create a winning product. Once we do that we fill the stadium. It does not work in reverse. This is like the people who want to make a donation to Cal Football once it goes to the Rose Bowl and only then.

Chicken and the egg people

---

Does Wilcox understand this? I'm being serious. Does he know that the absolutely boring program he leads is hampering his efforts to have a winning program? Does he know that his conservative tendencies on offense and defense keep fans from being excited and that that is a harm to his program?
He is aware of any of this?

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I mean he's watching the same game we are.

Sebastabear said:

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Gunga la Gunga said:

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Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

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Yes, if only we could think of a way to fill the stadium. I wonder what that could possibly be? Oh I know how about having an interesting and dynamic team that people want to watch? That might be worth a try.

That is of course the entire point of this thesis. We need to create a winning product. Once we do that we fill the stadium. It does not work in reverse. This is like the people who want to make a donation to Cal Football once it goes to the Rose Bowl and only then.

Chicken and the egg people

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Cal Strong and Sebastabear are two strong horses in a harness here.

Cal Strong disagree with Sebastabear on a number of things, but he agree with this post by 7,000 strong percentage points.

BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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Cal Strong! said:

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sycasey said:

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Cal Strong! said:

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sycasey said:

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Cal Strong! said:

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But another problematic claim is that that the administration needs to step up more in terms of greater financial commitments. This flows from Sebastabear's (mistaken) view that the administration has under-invested in revenue sports.

Cal Strong was in communication with Chancellor Christ's team in the early days of the conference meltdown -- shortly after Oregon and UW left -- long before the decision was made to go full speed ahead at petitioning the ACC. There were discussions of bringing Cal Strong on as a consultant.

From these meetings, Cal Strong can tell you that there were serious voices in the room about shutting football down entirely -- because it is perceived that the University invests WAAAAAYYYYYY too much in it considering the outcomes it produces.

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Can you explain why you think Sebastabear is "mistaken" here? He provided the numbers for how much Cal spends on football and compared to how much other Pac-12 schools spend and showed it is less. Are those numbers wrong?

Your only rebuttal is, effectively, to say that other people at Cal FEEL like they are spending too much on football. Well, no s***. That doesn't make them right.

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Yes, Sebastabear is mistaken on some of the numbers. But this is not an indictment of him. Cal Strong has no interest in dumping on Sebastabear. And he is not permitted to share work product.

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So Cal is not spending less on football than Utah? Where does Cal land in terms of spending on revenue sports, relative to peer schools?

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You are letting your FEELings into this. Please read above.

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Pretty sure that was just a direct request for facts, but okay.

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I'm not here to dump on either guy's portrayal of the numbers, but according to the financial statements released by Cal, in 2022 Cal's operating expenses for football were $29,536,009. It was $29M in 2020 and $30M in 2019. (it was $19M in 2021, but that was because of Covid)

Those numbers don't include the $5M per year debt service on SAHPC which are not operating expenses.

Just providing straight numbers as asked.

Utah on the other hand, had $40M in football operating expenses in 2022. (again off their public financial statements. However, in fairness, $4M was directly attributable to its bowl game (travel expenses and coaching bonuses).and they made money on that as well. And then the last difficult part is that $40M includes leases, rentals and debt service of $11M (mainly for facilities). Technically debt service is not operating expenses, but the others are. It's not broken out separately, so I can't tell what that number is. The best I can do is say Utah's football operating expense + debt service is $40M, and Cal's is $34.5M. However, I don't think attributing the one time bowl expenses is fair and that would bring Utah down to $36M. Or if you think that IS fair, I think at most you should acknowledge that Utah also made $3.2M on the bowl, so I think like for like, the number is $36M or $36.8M to $34.5M.

Here's a problem. Donations to Cal football = $3M. Donations to Utah football = $19M.

Total Donations to Cal athletics = $15.5M. Total donations to Utah athletics = $28.5M

Cal's institutional support = $31M, Utah =$5.3M

On the flip side,

Cal student fees = $0, Utah =$6.3M

If I take out the institutional support and student fee numbers from revenue, Utah's total athletic revenue was $102M. Cal's was $89M. Note the donations make up that difference.

On the one hand, Utah is spending a smidge more on football operating expenses. On the other hand, Cal is contributing A LOT MORE, university dollars to operating expenses while Utah's DONORS are spending a lot more on operating expenses.

And before people start saying "yeah, but the university charges us for scholarships, Utah does to and our line items are almost the same for that.

I'm just providing numbers off the financial statements. I'm not making commentary. Except that I will make this one, these are officially reported financial statements and unlike the common refrain, it is not easy to fudge them. They may have some differences in which buckets they report things in, (like Cal breaking out debt on SAHPC separately), but they have to pass accounting muster.

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I appreciate your efforts to put numbers together.

One question I have is the comparative "cost of living" factor. Everything costs more in CA, particularly as compared to Utah. My guess is that in addition to spending more $$, Utah is also getting a lot more bang for its buck.

On a related note, how are player scholarships accounted for in these costs? I recall hearing that Cal AD is charged out of state tuition for the players (43k+). Do schools like Utah do the same? And even if they do, Utah tuition is lower (which is part of my point in the preceding paragraph).

Sebastabear said:

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I posted this yesterday on the insider board and have received a few DMs asking me to repost on Growls. Doing so now. If you read the insider version you can skip. I will however make one additional point to what I wrote there. I have been asked how NIL fits into all this. The answer is what follows is an analysis of what I think the Cal administration, the Regents and a few individuals should be doing. In terms of what the fanbase should be doing, the answer is still the same. Nothing fans can do is more impactful for our program than NIL. Nothing comes close. It allows a levelling of a playing field that has been tilted against Cal for the entire modern era of football and MBB. Agree or disagree, that's not really the point of what follows.

And we're off.


THE PROBLEM

I will make a few posts outlining my thoughts on what I believe we need to change about Cal athletics to preserve the program. This first post will focus on our finances. The second will focus on the cultural/attitudinal reset I believe we desperately need within the school, the department and as fans. This will be long and largely be the ruminations of just some dude who holds no official title and occupies no position of authority within the athletic department. So proceed at your own peril.

Note this also isn't a discussion on "Why". Why do we need big time athletics at Cal? Honestly much as people want to continue to discuss whether Cal can or should operate in some sort of Xanadu West-Coast Ivy model, that boat left the dock more than a decade ago when we spent half a billion dollars to renovate the stadium. We needed to go big or go home and we went big. It has also been pointed out many times how many schools have enhanced their academic standing using athletics (primarily football but also MBB), how it drives undergraduate applications, how every study from Marts & Lundy on down has shown how impactful it is as a means of donor outreach and in driving donations to the rest of the University, etc. To say nothing of the thesis that Cal should excel at everything it does. And that includes both athletics and academics. Some aren't convinced by any of that. Fine. There are definitely counterpoints to everything I just wrote. But since these are my thoughts, I'm going to spend the time discussing how does Cal athletics survive and stay relevant and not on the why it should.

There is however at least one "why" question that I do want to tackle. It's not why do we need big time athletics at Cal. It's why we came within a hair's breadth of being relegated out of existence. As our recent near-death experience with the end of the Pac-12 fades into the rearview mirror, I believe one of our greatest risks is that we continue trying to do the same things in more or less the same way, which will create the exact same problem in three or four years. I'm already sensing less urgency around issues like the need to restructure the athletic department that were almost a given as we came within a North Carolina State vote of oblivion. We can't allow ourselves to ignore what happened and why. Because when the wheel turns again with the next round of realignment (and realignment is absolutely happening again soon) we won't be facing a "near" death experience. It will be actual death and 138 years of Cal athletics history will come to an end. On our watch.

The answer to why no conference wanted us and why we and Stanford had to struggle to find a home while far less illustrious academic institutions were warmly embraced is somewhat obvious. The answer is we have sucked in our revenue sports. We have underfunded our revenue sports for far, far too long compared to our peers and this has resulted in us . . . well sucking. That is blunt, but that's the truth. We have lost more than we have won, we have not been entertaining to watch and many of our alumni (to say nothing of more casual fans) have tuned out. We have at the same time degraded the game day experience to a significant extent (although we've made some strides in reversing that tide the band played more last week than it has in years). But fundamentally our performance stunk, our alumni tuned out and "tuning out" resulted in us being radioactive (or at least unattractive) to the television networks who pulled the strings on this last round of realignment. Gene Smith of Ohio State has noted that realignment is about two things and two things only: Football and money (which are really the same thing when you get down to it). We failed to invest in football, we pursued other priorities and as a result this round of realignment almost cost us everything.

To be clear, I absolutely do not believe that anyone in our administration has wanted us to suck at football (at least since Chancellor Tien - still have some doubts about why he did what he did to Bruce Snyder). Our current administration would of course be completely delighted if Cal would win the conference and go to the Rose Bowl. It would tremendously burnish their reputations and legacy and result in the secondary and tertiary benefits I outlined above. But wanting something and doing everything it takes to achieve it are not the same thing.

So why did we underfund our revenue sports? Well to be fair, I think our administration would dispute that's what has happened. They would note that Cal has devoted significant financial resources toward sports in general. And that is objectively true. The $20m - $30m annual subsidy from the Chancellor, taking half of the stadium debt off the department's books, etc. are all meaningful and significant and appreciated. But I would note that these were investments in athletics in general, not just in football in particular. I'd also note we aren't operating in a vacuum. That the $20m - $30m annual subsidy from the university is not out of line with what other public flagships are doing. Cal is not doing something outsized there. From everything I've been able to uncover it actually seems we may even be on the low side. Is it good for universities to do this? Well across America schools have decided it is a good thing in terms of engagement and donations and the other factors I mentioned above. But again, that's a discussion for another post. The bottom line is we have maintained a larger number of teams and a larger number of athletic scholarships than virtually any other public school in the country. Instead of having as broad an athletic program our conference peers chose to invest their resources in their football programs, specifically. It's as simple as that. Too much of the football revenue we have generated at Cal has gone to fund the athletic department and too little has gone to football itself and the results speak for themselves.

While we were spending $23m to operate football at Cal, Utah was spending $33m. And Utah went to the Rose Bowl and we . . . did not. With two full-time staff members we run the smallest recruiting department for football in the Pac-12. By far. Justin Wilcox is well-compensated, but we have historically had one of the smallest assistant coaches salary pools (certainly taking into account cost of living), which honestly is how we wound up with Bill Musgrave. We found an OC we could afford, not the one we needed. Our social media investment is miniscule compared to our peers. And above it all, our administration has to spend time overseeing 30 sports giving us huge administrative overhead expenses and the things our revenue sports need get delayed and attention gets diverted. And guess what? All of this is going to get worse, and all of these distinctions are going to be more pronounced vis--vis our peers, when we move to the ACC. We arguably have needed a fresh start for a very long time in football and MBB but we desperately need it now if we plan to compete in the ACC and win enough games and build enough of a television audience with enough fan support so Cal will not be on the outside looking in the next time the realignment roulette wheel spins. Which, as I said, virtually every observer who has written about the topic (to say nothing of all the myriad coaches and administrators who have proffered opinions) have said absolutely will happen before the end of this decade.



THE NUMBERS

Some numbers to keep in mind. And I'm going to speak in round numbers here so let's not get caught up in whether something is $20m or $18m. For purposes of this discussion that level of precision doesn't matter. What matters is what we have and what we need and directionally what I'm about to write is accurate enough for purposes of this "problem/solution" analysis.

What we have is a $120m problem. That is the approximate current size of running the Cal athletic department annually. Jon Wilner from the Mercury news has reported on this extensively. I think Cal athletics receives approximately $23m in direct assistance from the Chancellor which is booked as revenue (note in 2022 this was allegedly $31m according to Wilner but there may have been some one-time costs in there. I don't know). I often hear the direct campus subsidy described as a "$20m annually" with a goal of driving it down to $13m over time. Bottom line it's a lot.

On media revenue the near-term revenue hit to Cal (while it is receiving only 30% of Tier 1 revenue) from joining the ACC compared to what it got from the Pac 12 is going to be about $20m annually.

So to recap:

• We are losing $20m annually in media revenue.
• We have chronically underinvested in football and that underinvestment is what just about killed off everything. Meaning if we are moving forward (and we are) we need to spend more on football. How much more? Back of the envelope, I would calculate we need to spend about $15m more annually on football operations to become competitive and position us so we aren't left out in the next round of realignment. This number is soft but it's my best (educated) estimate.
• We are about to face increased travel costs of joining the ACC of somewhere around $10m annually.

So $20m less revenue annually from the media deal and the need to spend $25m more (at least) including travel paints an ugly picture. A $45m gap. And that of course assumes that the subsidy from Central Campus of $20m to $30m stays the same under the next Chancellor. Without that things are much uglier. All without taking into account any buyouts we may need to come up with to replace personnel or the significant investments our fans need to make in NIL.

In a word: Yikes.


THE SOLUTION
So that's the problem as I see it. Both historical and present. Which begs the question of what is the solution. What do we need to do? We collectively spend far too much talking about how awful things are and our problems and candidly it's tiresome and nihilistic. So I would like to talk about the path forward instead.

I think Cal athletics needs to do three things to survive. None of these are easy. None of these are pleasant (with the exception of forcing the song stealers from UCLA to pay a Calimony penalty for trying to murder our athletic department). But I believe they all are absolutely necessary if we want to survive and must be done now.

1. Calimony payment from UCLA. This entire debacle was caused by UCLA and by the Regents acceding to their request to leave Cal and the other members of the Pac-12 to join the Big 10. Had the Pac-12 been able to preserve the LA media market (by keeping UCLA even as it lost USC) while it negotiated its new distribution deal things would have come out differently. Let's not fool ourselves. The LA media market is the second largest media market in the country. It is more than 2x the Pac-12's next largest media market (the Bay Area). Losing that market was never going to end well or even acceptably for a conference trying to ink a new media deal. I screamed from every rooftop that the conference was dead the moment UCLA and USC announced and that prediction unfortunately proved 100% correct.

So how much Calimony should the Regents give us? As a refresher when the Regents approved UCLA's move they set the range as $2m-$10m (with $10m being a very late addition thrown in almost as they were adjourning given the uncertainty on the damage this move was going to inflict on the system's flagship). It was also unclear at the time if this was meant to be an annual payment or just a one-time payment, although "one-time" doesn't make sense in this context. The media payments are annual so the subsidy needs to be annual as well. This was left open while the Regents awaited what George Kliavkoff could come up with for the Pac-12. Well that answer is now in and unfortunately $10m annually is only a down payment on the damage UCLA wrought.

So what should the Regents do? In a perfect world given who did what to whom they would take all the money that Cal is getting from the ACC add it to all the money UCLA is getting from the Big 10, divide that total in half and give each school that amount. So $65m from the Big10 for UCLA and $15m from the ACC for Cal would mean each school would get $40m annually. And please spare me the sputtering outrage of those who think everything that went down is Cal's "fault" and this would be unjust. Yes, Cal made mistakes. It's most egregious one being underfunding its football program to the extent it was uncompetitive. As I've noted, Utah wins a lot more than Cal because Utah spends a lot more than Cal on football. But this mistake isn't the proximate cause of this fiscal train wreck. What caused this was UCLA slinking off in the dead of night and leaving Cal and the rest of the conference holding the bag. So this revenue split is not only "fair" it is right. We aren't stealing UCLA's windfall for ourselves. The University of California system (and it is indeed one system) is redistributing the revenue essentially stolen from Cal by UCLA.

Now, it doesn't really make any difference how this happens. If the Regents want to say UCLA can keep all of the money but we (the Regents) are going to give Cal an equivalent amount then that's fine. Super unlikely, but fine. If the Regents want to say UCLA can keep all the money from the Big 10 but we are going to cut how much money we (the Regents) allocate to UCLA by a set amount and allocate those funds to Cal, then that's fine too. Cash is fungible and I'm not arguing that both UCLA and Cal should be starved of the revenue required to successfully run their programs in competitive conferences. What I'm arguing is that UCLA can't cause harm to Cal and keep all the benefits while Cal suffers all the harm.

Do I think this will happen? Not really. It would be a pretty gutsy move and pretty out of keeping with what the Regents have done in this sphere to date. But I think it would be just and put both campuses of the system on an even footing. And then they both can figure out how to make up their funding shortfalls and make the needed investments. But at a minimum I think Cal should get the $10m annual Calimony payments the Regents specified. If anything, the financial situation with the media payments for Cal compared to UCLA are much, much worse than what we all thought possible when they specified that range. So if Cal getting $15m annually in media money and UCLA getting $65m annually doesn't call for the full subsidy, then I can't imagine what would. But even at $10m that's nowhere near making up for the $45m annual gap I outlined above. We need more. And on that note . . .

2. Major Donors. I don't realistically think Cal can find a way out of this fiscal hole without getting some serious help from major donors. And here I'm not talking about five or six figure checks. SMU just raised $100m from 30 donors to make up for their 0% Tier 1 revenue share (compared to Cal and Stanford's 30%) from the ACC over the next nine years. It's super impressive and we need a similar commitment from our donor base who frankly has many multiples of the wealth of SMU's. Back of the envelope, I think Cal should aim for $20m annually (more on whether that's realistic below). If they could get more, great. But this probably requires multiple people writing $5m + checks. Will they? Well they absolutely can but I'll say at the outset I am loathe to tell anyone how to spend their own money. These folks are some of the wealthiest people on the planet and they have constant demands on their time and money. And many of them could care less about athletics. But some of them care deeply about athletics and have invested $10's of millions in Cal athletics already (to say nothing of what they've done for the University). And unlike many other schools, at Cal these folks have not been involved in funding our NIL to date for a variety of personal reasons. That's totally their call and I don't begrudge them for making that decision for a second. But I would hope that a few of these folks who deeply love Cal athletics and have the means would be willing to join in this fight to make sure Cal athletics not only survives but thrives. And that all of their prior donations won't have been wasted.

Here I take some comfort from the fact that Carol Christ and Jim Knowlton have both proven to be excellent fundraisers and we are raising more money for the University in general and athletics in particular than ever. But we're not talking here about naming a stadium or a plaza. We are talking about getting people to write $5m checks to pay for OPERATING expenses. Something we've never fundraised for at these levels. And we are asking them to do this while our football team finds new and incredibly frustrating ways to lose every week and our trajectory in football is (kindly) "uncertain." To say it's a tall order would be to dramatically undersell the challenge. So Cal can and should aim for $20m. But realistically? I'd expect $10m to be a stretch and delighted if we could raise $15m annually for the next several years. Obviously if they knock the cover off the ball and raise like $50m annually we can ignore the next section, but I have no reason to believe that is how this is going to go down.

3. Get endowments, cut sports or increase central campus support. So let's recap where we are. By my calculations we have a $45m (minimum) shortfall in athletic funding without talking about buy-outs or any other one time costs if we want our athletic department to survive beyond the next few years. We can (optimistically) expect to get $10m in Calimony from the Regents annually. We can (super optimistically) find a way to fundraise $15m annually for operating costs. So that leaves a minimum of a $20m shortfall. $20m is not a small number. It's 1/6 of our entire current budget. And, again, totally ignores the need for major capital improvements or buy-outs. So what else do we need to do?

Cal runs 30 sports. No other public school in our (soon to be defunct) conference runs 30 sports. Our sister school UCLA has 25. University of Washington has 21. Oregon has 20. Arizona has 20. Utah has 19. Colorado has 17. Even USC with their almost infinite endowment only runs 23. Stanford has a lot but they just tried to cut sports and suffer from the same under-investment and under-performance issues in football as we do. You see a pattern here? Why is this? BECAUSE NO ONE CAN AFFORD IT!!!! You have to look at "athletics first" schools like Michigan and Ohio State with their massive budgets to see any public school running something the size of our athletic department and even Michigan with 2x our budget and revenue only fields 29 sports. What we are doing is simply unaffordable and the root of so many of our myriad woes. We are trying to compete in Formula One with a budget equivalent to the local Go Kart racers. Want more? Washington had $145m in revenue where we had $118m. Washington has 21 sports to fund and we have 30. Washington's football team will likely play in the CFP, because they have invested in football, they received an invitation to join the Big 10 and we . . . won't and didn't. Is any of this a mystery? Hard to understand? Well it shouldn't be. Our competitors have higher revenue (soon to be dramatically higher) and dramatically lower overhead expenses than us. And they have as a result created a quality product that consumers want to buy and we haven't. What we are doing is unaffordable and our insistence on following this trajectory has almost destroyed our entire athletic program, and very soon may do exactly that if we don't change.

So absent additional campus support, a number of our non-revenue sports need to either get fully endowed or demoted to club status. Will say at the outset that the entire prospect of cutting multiple sports is a gut punch to me personally. I am proud that Cal has 30 sports. I love that we are able to give some form of scholarship to 900 athletes, what that means for the diversity of the university and how many students have an opportunity at a world-class education and a better life because of our athletic department. I only agreed to create this NIL gig for Cal with the explicit understanding that it would be a big tent and for all of our student athletes. But at some point folks we need to wake up and smell the napalm. As mentioned above there are no P5/P4 public schools (excepting Ohio State which has a budget more than 2x ours) who tries to operate 30 varsity teams. I love our sports program but I can read an income statement and what we have done does not work and our efforts to do so have almost destroyed us. And if we continue on this path instead of having 20 sports (or whatever) we will wind up with zero. This is triage and sometimes hard decisions have to be made to save the patient. This is one of them.

Despite what I just wrote, I should note that there are a few Deus Ex Machina solutions that don't involve cutting sports. They involve getting a bunch of money from donors (above the $15m in donations for football I said we need) to endow sports or Central Campus (which already is strained and has a large structural deficit) increasing its annual subsidy. These are very tough and seem to me the least likely of all the aggressive and difficult moves outlined above. But the time has come to take tough actions and if we want to preserve these programs these options are at least on the table.

On endowments, most of you recall that Cal tried to cut a bunch of sports over a decade ago and it was a trainwreck. All of those sports were preserved because of the hue and cry raised by certain influential donors and efforts commenced to raise funds to get them endowed. But my understanding is that none of these teams has yet hit this objective although a few have gotten close. But I am also uncertain for the men's sports in particular that Cal has correctly applied the right endowment filter. Fully endowed going forward has to mean for the non-revenue men's teams that they raise enough to pay for 100% of their operating expenses annually (including scholarships and whatever it takes to operate their facilities), to pay for an equivalent number of women's scholarships and that team's operating expenses to comply with Title IX, and to pay their pro rata share of the administrative expenses in operating our slimmed-down athletic department.

I know that sounds daunting and harsh. That sounds like a huge burden to put on these teams (which as far as I understand it none has yet hit). But the point, as I've spent the last several pages outlining, has to be that these sports have to stop taking money earned by football to fund themselves. Football money needs to be spent on football and on enough women's teams to comply with Title IX. We can no longer afford for football money to be diverted to men's teams or to anything else. If we continue to do that, I firmly believe we will lose it all. Both football and all our men's teams and all our women's teams. Again, this is a bitter pill but we need to make a cold-eyed assessment of the world we live in and follow the path every other university has already taken. We can no longer afford to be an outlier. Unless . . .

Our Chancellor could decide that the value of our broad-based athletic department is worth the cost. We want to have 30 sports. We want all of these sports to survive. We think this is part of our DNA and we will stop robbing Peter (football) to pay Paul (everyone else) to make that happen. In that case, the Chancellor could decide to actually INCREASE the direct support to athletics out of the Central Campus fund. I mentioned above that the current amount the Chancellor is subsidizing athletics hovers in the $20m-$30m range right now (with a long-term goal of reducing it to $13m). What if the Chancellor decides that number should be $40m? $50m? Then this final gap can be closed. I'm not necessarily advocating for this approach and I know there are many demands on the campus' money. But we don't ask the history department to raise money for the geology department. We think having a geology department is good. It's part of our mission. So we pay for that. Similarly, we can pay for track and field and men's gymnastics rather than asking football to fund them. There's no inescapable logic of making football pay for all these other sports (other than what is strictly needed under Title IX). It's time to stop doing that.


If any of you actually made it to the end of this, I salute you. I wrote all of this to share with certain members of our administration as part of my Quixotic quest to have Cal change its approach to athletics. I hope those who read it found at least some of it illuminating. Bottom line, we need to invest more in football. Hopefully recent events have conclusively demonstrated the risks to our entire athletic department in not doing so. But if we can make these changes and embrace these opportunities I don't believe there's anything we can't do together. Cal should be excellent at everything it does. And that should include sports.

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That was an incredibly educational post. I had no idea about Christ and Knowlton being excellent fundraisers...
Thanks for all you do, as others have said...

Gunga la Gunga said:

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Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

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Perhaps we could try…marketing? It's worth a shot. Give away tickets to school kids. Run TV commercials (like Stanford does). Sell discounted tickets at Costco (like UNR does).

BearGoggles said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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sycasey said:

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Cal Strong! said:

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sycasey said:

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Cal Strong! said:

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sycasey said:

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Cal Strong! said:

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But another problematic claim is that that the administration needs to step up more in terms of greater financial commitments. This flows from Sebastabear's (mistaken) view that the administration has under-invested in revenue sports.

Cal Strong was in communication with Chancellor Christ's team in the early days of the conference meltdown -- shortly after Oregon and UW left -- long before the decision was made to go full speed ahead at petitioning the ACC. There were discussions of bringing Cal Strong on as a consultant.

From these meetings, Cal Strong can tell you that there were serious voices in the room about shutting football down entirely -- because it is perceived that the University invests WAAAAAYYYYYY too much in it considering the outcomes it produces.

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Can you explain why you think Sebastabear is "mistaken" here? He provided the numbers for how much Cal spends on football and compared to how much other Pac-12 schools spend and showed it is less. Are those numbers wrong?

Your only rebuttal is, effectively, to say that other people at Cal FEEL like they are spending too much on football. Well, no s***. That doesn't make them right.

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Yes, Sebastabear is mistaken on some of the numbers. But this is not an indictment of him. Cal Strong has no interest in dumping on Sebastabear. And he is not permitted to share work product.

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So Cal is not spending less on football than Utah? Where does Cal land in terms of spending on revenue sports, relative to peer schools?

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You are letting your FEELings into this. Please read above.

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Pretty sure that was just a direct request for facts, but okay.

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I'm not here to dump on either guy's portrayal of the numbers, but according to the financial statements released by Cal, in 2022 Cal's operating expenses for football were $29,536,009. It was $29M in 2020 and $30M in 2019. (it was $19M in 2021, but that was because of Covid)

Those numbers don't include the $5M per year debt service on SAHPC which are not operating expenses.

Just providing straight numbers as asked.

Utah on the other hand, had $40M in football operating expenses in 2022. (again off their public financial statements. However, in fairness, $4M was directly attributable to its bowl game (travel expenses and coaching bonuses).and they made money on that as well. And then the last difficult part is that $40M includes leases, rentals and debt service of $11M (mainly for facilities). Technically debt service is not operating expenses, but the others are. It's not broken out separately, so I can't tell what that number is. The best I can do is say Utah's football operating expense + debt service is $40M, and Cal's is $34.5M. However, I don't think attributing the one time bowl expenses is fair and that would bring Utah down to $36M. Or if you think that IS fair, I think at most you should acknowledge that Utah also made $3.2M on the bowl, so I think like for like, the number is $36M or $36.8M to $34.5M.

Here's a problem. Donations to Cal football = $3M. Donations to Utah football = $19M.

Total Donations to Cal athletics = $15.5M. Total donations to Utah athletics = $28.5M

Cal's institutional support = $31M, Utah =$5.3M

On the flip side,

Cal student fees = $0, Utah =$6.3M

If I take out the institutional support and student fee numbers from revenue, Utah's total athletic revenue was $102M. Cal's was $89M. Note the donations make up that difference.

On the one hand, Utah is spending a smidge more on football operating expenses. On the other hand, Cal is contributing A LOT MORE, university dollars to operating expenses while Utah's DONORS are spending a lot more on operating expenses.

And before people start saying "yeah, but the university charges us for scholarships, Utah does to and our line items are almost the same for that.

I'm just providing numbers off the financial statements. I'm not making commentary. Except that I will make this one, these are officially reported financial statements and unlike the common refrain, it is not easy to fudge them. They may have some differences in which buckets they report things in, (like Cal breaking out debt on SAHPC separately), but they have to pass accounting muster.

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On a related note, how are player scholarships accounted for in these costs? I recall hearing that Cal AD is charged out of state tuition for the players (43k+). Do schools like Utah do the same? And even if they do, Utah tuition is lower (which is part of my point in the preceding paragraph).

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I have heard the out of state tuition argument over and over and it just isn't true. The number on the financial statements have never borne that out.

The dollars for scholarships for Cal and Utah are very close. That is not making a major difference

It's outrageous. Don't "those people" understand that football is life?

Sebastabear said:

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Gunga la Gunga said:

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Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

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Yes, if only we could think of a way to fill the stadium. I wonder what that could possibly be? Oh I know how about having an interesting and dynamic team that people want to watch? That might be worth a try.

That is of course the entire point of this thesis. We need to create a winning product. Once we do that we fill the stadium. It does not work in reverse. This is like the people who want to make a donation to Cal Football once it goes to the Rose Bowl and only then.

Chicken and the egg people

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And once we do, we get eyeballs on the TV. Which I think is a major thing we lack.

Thanks Sebasta for an eye-opening report.

Sebastabear said:

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89Bear said:

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Sebastabear said:

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Gunga la Gunga said:

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Stunning.

I've read this whole thread. Still no one else is focused on attendance. Everything else is icing. Answer the question of how to get 50,000 paid attendees per game into memorial, and this is the solution. The snowball runs downhill from there.

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Yes, if only we could think of a way to fill the stadium. I wonder what that could possibly be? Oh I know how about having an interesting and dynamic team that people want to watch? That might be worth a try.

That is of course the entire point of this thesis. We need to create a winning product. Once we do that we fill the stadium. It does not work in reverse. This is like the people who want to make a donation to Cal Football once it goes to the Rose Bowl and only then.

Chicken and the egg people

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Does Wilcox understand this? I'm being serious. Does he know that the absolutely boring program he leads is hampering his efforts to have a winning program? Does he know that his conservative tendencies on offense and defense keep fans from being excited and that that is a harm to his program?
He is aware of any of this?

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I mean he's watching the same game we are.

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But unlike most of us he is watching it with a focus on defense. Even the other team's. Many times in post games he can recount in great detail what we did on defense but only describes the offense in generalities.

Wilcox has said in several interviews that the way to get the crowd back is to win games. So he certainly understands the basic idea.

His problem isn't that he no understand. His problem is he no able to do it. And no one in their right minds want to give the program more money while he is at the helm.

Sebastabear said:

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I posted this yesterday on the insider board and have received a few DMs asking me to repost on Growls. Doing so now. If you read the insider version you can skip. I will however make one additional point to what I wrote there. I have been asked how NIL fits into all this. The answer is what follows is an analysis of what I think the Cal administration, the Regents and a few individuals should be doing. In terms of what the fanbase should be doing, the answer is still the same. Nothing fans can do is more impactful for our program than NIL. Nothing comes close. It allows a levelling of a playing field that has been tilted against Cal for the entire modern era of football and MBB. Agree or disagree, that's not really the point of what follows.

And we're off.


THE PROBLEM

I will make a few posts outlining my thoughts on what I believe we need to change about Cal athletics to preserve the program. This first post will focus on our finances. The second will focus on the cultural/attitudinal reset I believe we desperately need within the school, the department and as fans. This will be long and largely be the ruminations of just some dude who holds no official title and occupies no position of authority within the athletic department. So proceed at your own peril.

Note this also isn't a discussion on "Why". Why do we need big time athletics at Cal? Honestly much as people want to continue to discuss whether Cal can or should operate in some sort of Xanadu West-Coast Ivy model, that boat left the dock more than a decade ago when we spent half a billion dollars to renovate the stadium. We needed to go big or go home and we went big. It has also been pointed out many times how many schools have enhanced their academic standing using athletics (primarily football but also MBB), how it drives undergraduate applications, how every study from Marts & Lundy on down has shown how impactful it is as a means of donor outreach and in driving donations to the rest of the University, etc. To say nothing of the thesis that Cal should excel at everything it does. And that includes both athletics and academics. Some aren't convinced by any of that. Fine. There are definitely counterpoints to everything I just wrote. But since these are my thoughts, I'm going to spend the time discussing how does Cal athletics survive and stay relevant and not on the why it should.

There is however at least one "why" question that I do want to tackle. It's not why do we need big time athletics at Cal. It's why we came within a hair's breadth of being relegated out of existence. As our recent near-death experience with the end of the Pac-12 fades into the rearview mirror, I believe one of our greatest risks is that we continue trying to do the same things in more or less the same way, which will create the exact same problem in three or four years. I'm already sensing less urgency around issues like the need to restructure the athletic department that were almost a given as we came within a North Carolina State vote of oblivion. We can't allow ourselves to ignore what happened and why. Because when the wheel turns again with the next round of realignment (and realignment is absolutely happening again soon) we won't be facing a "near" death experience. It will be actual death and 138 years of Cal athletics history will come to an end. On our watch.

The answer to why no conference wanted us and why we and Stanford had to struggle to find a home while far less illustrious academic institutions were warmly embraced is somewhat obvious. The answer is we have sucked in our revenue sports. We have underfunded our revenue sports for far, far too long compared to our peers and this has resulted in us . . . well sucking. That is blunt, but that's the truth. We have lost more than we have won, we have not been entertaining to watch and many of our alumni (to say nothing of more casual fans) have tuned out. We have at the same time degraded the game day experience to a significant extent (although we've made some strides in reversing that tide the band played more last week than it has in years). But fundamentally our performance stunk, our alumni tuned out and "tuning out" resulted in us being radioactive (or at least unattractive) to the television networks who pulled the strings on this last round of realignment. Gene Smith of Ohio State has noted that realignment is about two things and two things only: Football and money (which are really the same thing when you get down to it). We failed to invest in football, we pursued other priorities and as a result this round of realignment almost cost us everything.

To be clear, I absolutely do not believe that anyone in our administration has wanted us to suck at football (at least since Chancellor Tien - still have some doubts about why he did what he did to Bruce Snyder). Our current administration would of course be completely delighted if Cal would win the conference and go to the Rose Bowl. It would tremendously burnish their reputations and legacy and result in the secondary and tertiary benefits I outlined above. But wanting something and doing everything it takes to achieve it are not the same thing.

So why did we underfund our revenue sports? Well to be fair, I think our administration would dispute that's what has happened. They would note that Cal has devoted significant financial resources toward sports in general. And that is objectively true. The $20m - $30m annual subsidy from the Chancellor, taking half of the stadium debt off the department's books, etc. are all meaningful and significant and appreciated. But I would note that these were investments in athletics in general, not just in football in particular. I'd also note we aren't operating in a vacuum. That the $20m - $30m annual subsidy from the university is not out of line with what other public flagships are doing. Cal is not doing something outsized there. From everything I've been able to uncover it actually seems we may even be on the low side. Is it good for universities to do this? Well across America schools have decided it is a good thing in terms of engagement and donations and the other factors I mentioned above. But again, that's a discussion for another post. The bottom line is we have maintained a larger number of teams and a larger number of athletic scholarships than virtually any other public school in the country. Instead of having as broad an athletic program our conference peers chose to invest their resources in their football programs, specifically. It's as simple as that. Too much of the football revenue we have generated at Cal has gone to fund the athletic department and too little has gone to football itself and the results speak for themselves.

While we were spending $23m to operate football at Cal, Utah was spending $33m. And Utah went to the Rose Bowl and we . . . did not. With two full-time staff members we run the smallest recruiting department for football in the Pac-12. By far. Justin Wilcox is well-compensated, but we have historically had one of the smallest assistant coaches salary pools (certainly taking into account cost of living), which honestly is how we wound up with Bill Musgrave. We found an OC we could afford, not the one we needed. Our social media investment is miniscule compared to our peers. And above it all, our administration has to spend time overseeing 30 sports giving us huge administrative overhead expenses and the things our revenue sports need get delayed and attention gets diverted. And guess what? All of this is going to get worse, and all of these distinctions are going to be more pronounced vis--vis our peers, when we move to the ACC. We arguably have needed a fresh start for a very long time in football and MBB but we desperately need it now if we plan to compete in the ACC and win enough games and build enough of a television audience with enough fan support so Cal will not be on the outside looking in the next time the realignment roulette wheel spins. Which, as I said, virtually every observer who has written about the topic (to say nothing of all the myriad coaches and administrators who have proffered opinions) have said absolutely will happen before the end of this decade.



THE NUMBERS

Some numbers to keep in mind. And I'm going to speak in round numbers here so let's not get caught up in whether something is $20m or $18m. For purposes of this discussion that level of precision doesn't matter. What matters is what we have and what we need and directionally what I'm about to write is accurate enough for purposes of this "problem/solution" analysis.

What we have is a $120m problem. That is the approximate current size of running the Cal athletic department annually. Jon Wilner from the Mercury news has reported on this extensively. I think Cal athletics receives approximately $23m in direct assistance from the Chancellor which is booked as revenue (note in 2022 this was allegedly $31m according to Wilner but there may have been some one-time costs in there. I don't know). I often hear the direct campus subsidy described as a "$20m annually" with a goal of driving it down to $13m over time. Bottom line it's a lot.

On media revenue the near-term revenue hit to Cal (while it is receiving only 30% of Tier 1 revenue) from joining the ACC compared to what it got from the Pac 12 is going to be about $20m annually.

So to recap:

• We are losing $20m annually in media revenue.
• We have chronically underinvested in football and that underinvestment is what just about killed off everything. Meaning if we are moving forward (and we are) we need to spend more on football. How much more? Back of the envelope, I would calculate we need to spend about $15m more annually on football operations to become competitive and position us so we aren't left out in the next round of realignment. This number is soft but it's my best (educated) estimate.
• We are about to face increased travel costs of joining the ACC of somewhere around $10m annually.

So $20m less revenue annually from the media deal and the need to spend $25m more (at least) including travel paints an ugly picture. A $45m gap. And that of course assumes that the subsidy from Central Campus of $20m to $30m stays the same under the next Chancellor. Without that things are much uglier. All without taking into account any buyouts we may need to come up with to replace personnel or the significant investments our fans need to make in NIL.

In a word: Yikes.


THE SOLUTION
So that's the problem as I see it. Both historical and present. Which begs the question of what is the solution. What do we need to do? We collectively spend far too much talking about how awful things are and our problems and candidly it's tiresome and nihilistic. So I would like to talk about the path forward instead.

I think Cal athletics needs to do three things to survive. None of these are easy. None of these are pleasant (with the exception of forcing the song stealers from UCLA to pay a Calimony penalty for trying to murder our athletic department). But I believe they all are absolutely necessary if we want to survive and must be done now.

1. Calimony payment from UCLA. This entire debacle was caused by UCLA and by the Regents acceding to their request to leave Cal and the other members of the Pac-12 to join the Big 10. Had the Pac-12 been able to preserve the LA media market (by keeping UCLA even as it lost USC) while it negotiated its new distribution deal things would have come out differently. Let's not fool ourselves. The LA media market is the second largest media market in the country. It is more than 2x the Pac-12's next largest media market (the Bay Area). Losing that market was never going to end well or even acceptably for a conference trying to ink a new media deal. I screamed from every rooftop that the conference was dead the moment UCLA and USC announced and that prediction unfortunately proved 100% correct.

So how much Calimony should the Regents give us? As a refresher when the Regents approved UCLA's move they set the range as $2m-$10m (with $10m being a very late addition thrown in almost as they were adjourning given the uncertainty on the damage this move was going to inflict on the system's flagship). It was also unclear at the time if this was meant to be an annual payment or just a one-time payment, although "one-time" doesn't make sense in this context. The media payments are annual so the subsidy needs to be annual as well. This was left open while the Regents awaited what George Kliavkoff could come up with for the Pac-12. Well that answer is now in and unfortunately $10m annually is only a down payment on the damage UCLA wrought.

So what should the Regents do? In a perfect world given who did what to whom they would take all the money that Cal is getting from the ACC add it to all the money UCLA is getting from the Big 10, divide that total in half and give each school that amount. So $65m from the Big10 for UCLA and $15m from the ACC for Cal would mean each school would get $40m annually. And please spare me the sputtering outrage of those who think everything that went down is Cal's "fault" and this would be unjust. Yes, Cal made mistakes. It's most egregious one being underfunding its football program to the extent it was uncompetitive. As I've noted, Utah wins a lot more than Cal because Utah spends a lot more than Cal on football. But this mistake isn't the proximate cause of this fiscal train wreck. What caused this was UCLA slinking off in the dead of night and leaving Cal and the rest of the conference holding the bag. So this revenue split is not only "fair" it is right. We aren't stealing UCLA's windfall for ourselves. The University of California system (and it is indeed one system) is redistributing the revenue essentially stolen from Cal by UCLA.

Now, it doesn't really make any difference how this happens. If the Regents want to say UCLA can keep all of the money but we (the Regents) are going to give Cal an equivalent amount then that's fine. Super unlikely, but fine. If the Regents want to say UCLA can keep all the money from the Big 10 but we are going to cut how much money we (the Regents) allocate to UCLA by a set amount and allocate those funds to Cal, then that's fine too. Cash is fungible and I'm not arguing that both UCLA and Cal should be starved of the revenue required to successfully run their programs in competitive conferences. What I'm arguing is that UCLA can't cause harm to Cal and keep all the benefits while Cal suffers all the harm.

Do I think this will happen? Not really. It would be a pretty gutsy move and pretty out of keeping with what the Regents have done in this sphere to date. But I think it would be just and put both campuses of the system on an even footing. And then they both can figure out how to make up their funding shortfalls and make the needed investments. But at a minimum I think Cal should get the $10m annual Calimony payments the Regents specified. If anything, the financial situation with the media payments for Cal compared to UCLA are much, much worse than what we all thought possible when they specified that range. So if Cal getting $15m annually in media money and UCLA getting $65m annually doesn't call for the full subsidy, then I can't imagine what would. But even at $10m that's nowhere near making up for the $45m annual gap I outlined above. We need more. And on that note . . .

2. Major Donors. I don't realistically think Cal can find a way out of this fiscal hole without getting some serious help from major donors. And here I'm not talking about five or six figure checks. SMU just raised $100m from 30 donors to make up for their 0% Tier 1 revenue share (compared to Cal and Stanford's 30%) from the ACC over the next nine years. It's super impressive and we need a similar commitment from our donor base who frankly has many multiples of the wealth of SMU's. Back of the envelope, I think Cal should aim for $20m annually (more on whether that's realistic below). If they could get more, great. But this probably requires multiple people writing $5m + checks. Will they? Well they absolutely can but I'll say at the outset I am loathe to tell anyone how to spend their own money. These folks are some of the wealthiest people on the planet and they have constant demands on their time and money. And many of them could care less about athletics. But some of them care deeply about athletics and have invested $10's of millions in Cal athletics already (to say nothing of what they've done for the University). And unlike many other schools, at Cal these folks have not been involved in funding our NIL to date for a variety of personal reasons. That's totally their call and I don't begrudge them for making that decision for a second. But I would hope that a few of these folks who deeply love Cal athletics and have the means would be willing to join in this fight to make sure Cal athletics not only survives but thrives. And that all of their prior donations won't have been wasted.

Here I take some comfort from the fact that Carol Christ and Jim Knowlton have both proven to be excellent fundraisers and we are raising more money for the University in general and athletics in particular than ever. But we're not talking here about naming a stadium or a plaza. We are talking about getting people to write $5m checks to pay for OPERATING expenses. Something we've never fundraised for at these levels. And we are asking them to do this while our football team finds new and incredibly frustrating ways to lose every week and our trajectory in football is (kindly) "uncertain." To say it's a tall order would be to dramatically undersell the challenge. So Cal can and should aim for $20m. But realistically? I'd expect $10m to be a stretch and delighted if we could raise $15m annually for the next several years. Obviously if they knock the cover off the ball and raise like $50m annually we can ignore the next section, but I have no reason to believe that is how this is going to go down.

3. Get endowments, cut sports or increase central campus support. So let's recap where we are. By my calculations we have a $45m (minimum) shortfall in athletic funding without talking about buy-outs or any other one time costs if we want our athletic department to survive beyond the next few years. We can (optimistically) expect to get $10m in Calimony from the Regents annually. We can (super optimistically) find a way to fundraise $15m annually for operating costs. So that leaves a minimum of a $20m shortfall. $20m is not a small number. It's 1/6 of our entire current budget. And, again, totally ignores the need for major capital improvements or buy-outs. So what else do we need to do?

Cal runs 30 sports. No other public school in our (soon to be defunct) conference runs 30 sports. Our sister school UCLA has 25. University of Washington has 21. Oregon has 20. Arizona has 20. Utah has 19. Colorado has 17. Even USC with their almost infinite endowment only runs 23. Stanford has a lot but they just tried to cut sports and suffer from the same under-investment and under-performance issues in football as we do. You see a pattern here? Why is this? BECAUSE NO ONE CAN AFFORD IT!!!! You have to look at "athletics first" schools like Michigan and Ohio State with their massive budgets to see any public school running something the size of our athletic department and even Michigan with 2x our budget and revenue only fields 29 sports. What we are doing is simply unaffordable and the root of so many of our myriad woes. We are trying to compete in Formula One with a budget equivalent to the local Go Kart racers. Want more? Washington had $145m in revenue where we had $118m. Washington has 21 sports to fund and we have 30. Washington's football team will likely play in the CFP, because they have invested in football, they received an invitation to join the Big 10 and we . . . won't and didn't. Is any of this a mystery? Hard to understand? Well it shouldn't be. Our competitors have higher revenue (soon to be dramatically higher) and dramatically lower overhead expenses than us. And they have as a result created a quality product that consumers want to buy and we haven't. What we are doing is unaffordable and our insistence on following this trajectory has almost destroyed our entire athletic program, and very soon may do exactly that if we don't change.

So absent additional campus support, a number of our non-revenue sports need to either get fully endowed or demoted to club status. Will say at the outset that the entire prospect of cutting multiple sports is a gut punch to me personally. I am proud that Cal has 30 sports. I love that we are able to give some form of scholarship to 900 athletes, what that means for the diversity of the university and how many students have an opportunity at a world-class education and a better life because of our athletic department. I only agreed to create this NIL gig for Cal with the explicit understanding that it would be a big tent and for all of our student athletes. But at some point folks we need to wake up and smell the napalm. As mentioned above there are no P5/P4 public schools (excepting Ohio State which has a budget more than 2x ours) who tries to operate 30 varsity teams. I love our sports program but I can read an income statement and what we have done does not work and our efforts to do so have almost destroyed us. And if we continue on this path instead of having 20 sports (or whatever) we will wind up with zero. This is triage and sometimes hard decisions have to be made to save the patient. This is one of them.

Despite what I just wrote, I should note that there are a few Deus Ex Machina solutions that don't involve cutting sports. They involve getting a bunch of money from donors (above the $15m in donations for football I said we need) to endow sports or Central Campus (which already is strained and has a large structural deficit) increasing its annual subsidy. These are very tough and seem to me the least likely of all the aggressive and difficult moves outlined above. But the time has come to take tough actions and if we want to preserve these programs these options are at least on the table.

On endowments, most of you recall that Cal tried to cut a bunch of sports over a decade ago and it was a trainwreck. All of those sports were preserved because of the hue and cry raised by certain influential donors and efforts commenced to raise funds to get them endowed. But my understanding is that none of these teams has yet hit this objective although a few have gotten close. But I am also uncertain for the men's sports in particular that Cal has correctly applied the right endowment filter. Fully endowed going forward has to mean for the non-revenue men's teams that they raise enough to pay for 100% of their operating expenses annually (including scholarships and whatever it takes to operate their facilities), to pay for an equivalent number of women's scholarships and that team's operating expenses to comply with Title IX, and to pay their pro rata share of the administrative expenses in operating our slimmed-down athletic department.

I know that sounds daunting and harsh. That sounds like a huge burden to put on these teams (which as far as I understand it none has yet hit). But the point, as I've spent the last several pages outlining, has to be that these sports have to stop taking money earned by football to fund themselves. Football money needs to be spent on football and on enough women's teams to comply with Title IX. We can no longer afford for football money to be diverted to men's teams or to anything else. If we continue to do that, I firmly believe we will lose it all. Both football and all our men's teams and all our women's teams. Again, this is a bitter pill but we need to make a cold-eyed assessment of the world we live in and follow the path every other university has already taken. We can no longer afford to be an outlier. Unless . . .

Our Chancellor could decide that the value of our broad-based athletic department is worth the cost. We want to have 30 sports. We want all of these sports to survive. We think this is part of our DNA and we will stop robbing Peter (football) to pay Paul (everyone else) to make that happen. In that case, the Chancellor could decide to actually INCREASE the direct support to athletics out of the Central Campus fund. I mentioned above that the current amount the Chancellor is subsidizing athletics hovers in the $20m-$30m range right now (with a long-term goal of reducing it to $13m). What if the Chancellor decides that number should be $40m? $50m? Then this final gap can be closed. I'm not necessarily advocating for this approach and I know there are many demands on the campus' money. But we don't ask the history department to raise money for the geology department. We think having a geology department is good. It's part of our mission. So we pay for that. Similarly, we can pay for track and field and men's gymnastics rather than asking football to fund them. There's no inescapable logic of making football pay for all these other sports (other than what is strictly needed under Title IX). It's time to stop doing that.


If any of you actually made it to the end of this, I salute you. I wrote all of this to share with certain members of our administration as part of my Quixotic quest to have Cal change its approach to athletics. I hope those who read it found at least some of it illuminating. Bottom line, we need to invest more in football. Hopefully recent events have conclusively demonstrated the risks to our entire athletic department in not doing so. But if we can make these changes and embrace these opportunities I don't believe there's anything we can't do together. Cal should be excellent at everything it does. And that should include sports.

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Bravo! Ditto. My exact sentiment

"In some ways I do think maybe we should just drop football entirely and become a basketball school."

I have felt for a long time we should drop most of the humanities depts as they just suck up money that could be used for the sciences, engineering, become more specialized ..

same same?? LOL

Oakbear said:

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"In some ways I do think maybe we should just drop football entirely and become a basketball school."

I have felt for a long time we should drop most of the humanities depts as they just suck up money that could be used for the sciences, engineering, become more specialized ..

same same?? LOL

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You would get a lot of agreement on that.

Oakbear said:

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"In some ways I do think maybe we should just drop football entirely and become a basketball school."

I have felt for a long time we should drop most of the humanities depts as they just suck up money that could be used for the sciences, engineering, become more specialized ..

same same?? LOL

---

The difference is that football costs more money than other sports and I'm not sure if the humanities actually cost more than the sciences (probably not).

"The difference is that football costs more money than other sports and I'm not sure if the humanities actually cost more than the sciences (probably not)."

I wonder about that, does a prof in the humanities earn less than a science prof?

often the sciences get grant money which can cut costs

in some cases science discoveries lead to royalties for Cal-Berkeley (sic) which I don't think are generated by humanity profs

hard to measure, but you seem to assume that your statement is true

Oakbear said:

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"In some ways I do think maybe we should just drop football entirely and become a basketball school."

I have felt for a long time we should drop most of the humanities depts as they just suck up money that could be used for the sciences, engineering, become more specialized ..

same same?? LOL

---

I know you are joking, Oakbear, but I have to respond because the premise is based on 2 arguments, one that goes on here all of the time and so I think is important specific to us, and one that is a much more serious argument in our greater society and is based on a lot of flip judgments and misconceptions that run counter to actual evidence.

1. Why should a sport be required to break even when academic departments aren't?

The people of California provide tax payer dollars to UC's for the purposes of providing higher education. Students pay lots of money to the UC's in exchange for a product - a higher education. When the university goes out and raises $7 billion on the basis of donating to the academic institution and then separately raises a relative pittance for athletics, I think it is safe to say those donors were donating to deliver higher education to students. They have an avenue to donate to sports if they wish. Academic departments are properly allocated funds for the services they provide out of the funds the university receives for those services. And anyone who has a degree in a subject that is not backed by major corporate donations will tell you, the level of facilities they get is significantly impacted by the extra donations they can receive. For instance, the business school moved out of Barrows Hall into its great new building funded by corporate donations, complaining bitterly about what a steaming pile Barrows was. And then several social science departments moved into Barrows, happy about the upgrade. I do not think that we want the subjects that are taught to be based on what corporate America wants to donate. If student interest in those classes is not there, then certainly we should make those departments justify their existence because in that case, they have a product no one is buying. But that is not what is happening.

Sports is not the product the university is "selling". I completely support donations. I completely support if the students want to vote to add a fee to their tuition. But tuition is a fee for service and that service is providing academic classes to those paying the fee.

2. Why should we pay for humanities, social sciences, etc. that don't prepare students for a career?

The answer is that the entire premise of the question is incorrect. They do prepare students for a career. Data backs this up. No, they do not end up working as baristas. Their career earnings are comparable to, and in many cases exceed majors that are thought of career prep. They make less than engineers, but compare very favorably to business majors. People think of them as soft skills, but those skills do propel many people further than those who basically learned a trade. They may have to work harder at the beginning of their career, but they go further. The career earnings data is pretty clear about this. I'll throw out one data point from a parent student orientation from one of my kid's universities. This came from the dean of the school. They wanted to really emphasize the point of following your passion instead of chasing dollars. Gave a ton of data points, but this one stuck with me. The career earnings of a person in the 55th percentile of Art History majors were higher than those of a person in 45th percentile of Biology majors. The point, being slightly above average in Art History (as you were more likely to be if you were passionate about Art History) was better than being slightly below average in Biology (as you were more likely to be if you did it because you thought it would be more lucrative).

A lot of innovation comes from people in these majors. You can be taught to write code, and a whole lot of people can do that. If that is all you learn how to do, you can have a solid, if unspectacular career. The ideas that are worth coding is where the actual money is.

Sports is not the product the university is "selling"

you say this, but many would disagree with you

sports prepares people for the real world

I learned more playing competitive sports than in most of my classes as CA:-Berkeley

Oakbear said:

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"The difference is that football costs more money than other sports and I'm not sure if the humanities actually cost more than the sciences (probably not)."

I wonder about that, does a prof in the humanities earn less than a science prof?

often the sciences get grant money which can cut costs

in some cases science discoveries lead to royalties for Cal-Berkeley (sic) which I don't think are generated by humanity profs

hard to measure, but you seem to assume that your statement is true

---

As someone who has a degree in Anthropology and then walked across the plaza to enter the law school, I can tell you the Anthro building, offices, lecture hall, etc. all were absolute crap compared to the law school. The amount of support for students was night and day. In anthropology I saw an advisor to sign off on my fulfilling the prerequisites to declare the major and I saw an advisor to make sure I was going to graduate. Otherwise nada. In fact, I have never donated to the law school because I feel like neither the school nor the students need my money relatively speaking. I'd be glad to support those students, but Anthro students need it more.

I never minded, honestly. For me it was all about what went on in the classroom and all the other fluff were just like cupholders and headlight wipers on your car. But I guarantee you that those majors are not getting the same financial support.

Oakbear said:

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"The difference is that football costs more money than other sports and I'm not sure if the humanities actually cost more than the sciences (probably not)."

I wonder about that, does a prof in the humanities earn less than a science prof?

often the sciences get grant money which can cut costs

in some cases science discoveries lead to royalties for Cal-Berkeley (sic) which I don't think are generated by humanity profs

hard to measure, but you seem to assume that your statement is true

---

Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.

Humanities profs also get large grants, though they are typically not as large or numerous as STEM grants.

But Humanities profs don't require crazy expensive labs and equipment. They just need a dry erase marker every semester and a MacBook every couple of years.

;Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.'

As t should be in my opinion, but they still make pretty damn good money?

go here to see figures https://apo.ucsc.edu/docs/scales-crnt.pdf

BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Sports is not the product the university is "selling".

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Sports is nothing more than a marketing tool for the university to improve their brand value in order to attract students, faculty, and alumni donations. Think about schools like Oklahoma, Texas A&M, even Alabama that wouldn't be on the map if it wasn't for their football programs.

Given the strength of the Berkeley brand in driving all three, we absolutely don't need revenue sports and they represent more of a nice to have, especially compared to most other universities.

Oakbear said:

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;Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.'

As t should be in my opinion, but they still make pretty damn good money?

go here to see figures https://apo.ucsc.edu/docs/scales-crnt.pdf

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They should be less - market rate and all that.

Damn good money? I don't know. They do okay. Note that Cal and UCLA have gone heavily into hiring "lecturers" instead of professors to avoid tenure and pay less, and they have done that more in humanities and social sciences. A beginning lecturer makes less than a mid range public school teacher in California. It's a good job and I don't think they should complain, but I don't think they are exactly killing it either. I think if you are looking at a higher range humanities prof, you are looking at someone who has likely published and distinguished themselves.

It would also be interesting to compare that to head coaches' salaries in sports that no one cares about

BearlyCareAnymore said:

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Oakbear said:

---

;Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.'

As t should be in my opinion, but they still make pretty damn good money?

go here to see figures https://apo.ucsc.edu/docs/scales-crnt.pdf

---

They should be less - market rate and all that.

Damn good money? I don't know. They do okay. Note that Cal and UCLA have gone heavily into hiring "lecturers" instead of professors to avoid tenure and pay less, and they have done that more in humanities and social sciences. A beginning lecturer makes less than a mid range public school teacher in California. It's a good job and I don't think they should complain, but I don't think they are exactly killing it either. I think if you are looking at a higher range humanities prof, you are looking at someone who has likely published and distinguished themselves.

It would also be interesting to compare that to head coaches' salaries in sports that no one cares about

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That isn't a fair comparison. Humanities majors and classes are still very popular. So it isn't a supply/demand issue. There is plenty of demand.

A humanities student pays the same tuition as a bio student. But a University has to buy the bio student's professors a ton of expensive equipment. So the costs are much less for the university to take on humanities students. So it isn't a cost issue either.

Cal Strong! said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

---

Oakbear said:

---

;Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.'

As t should be in my opinion, but they still make pretty damn good money?

go here to see figures https://apo.ucsc.edu/docs/scales-crnt.pdf

---

They should be less - market rate and all that.

Damn good money? I don't know. They do okay. Note that Cal and UCLA have gone heavily into hiring "lecturers" instead of professors to avoid tenure and pay less, and they have done that more in humanities and social sciences. A beginning lecturer makes less than a mid range public school teacher in California. It's a good job and I don't think they should complain, but I don't think they are exactly killing it either. I think if you are looking at a higher range humanities prof, you are looking at someone who has likely published and distinguished themselves.

It would also be interesting to compare that to head coaches' salaries in sports that no one cares about

---

That isn't a fair comparison. Humanities majors and classes are still very popular. So it isn't a supply/demand issue. There is plenty of demand.

A humanities student pays the same tuition as a bio student. But a University has to buy the bio student's professors a ton of expensive equipment. So the costs are much less for the university to take on humanities students. So it isn't a cost issue either.

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Good points. By market rate, I meant what I perceive a humanities professor's value is on the open market vs. a STEM professor. Included in that is the fact that a PHD in STEM is going to be extremely valuable in non-teaching positions.

But yes, you are right on the relative costs of humanities students vs. STEM.

Cal Strong! said:

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Oakbear said:

---

"The difference is that football costs more money than other sports and I'm not sure if the humanities actually cost more than the sciences (probably not)."

I wonder about that, does a prof in the humanities earn less than a science prof?

often the sciences get grant money which can cut costs

in some cases science discoveries lead to royalties for Cal-Berkeley (sic) which I don't think are generated by humanity profs

hard to measure, but you seem to assume that your statement is true

---

Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.

Humanities profs also get large grants, though they are typically not as large or numerous as STEM grants.

But Humanities profs don't require crazy expensive labs and equipment. They just need a dry erase marker every semester and a MacBook every couple of years.

---

So clearly we should drop the sciences and keep the humanities.
Do you think maybe we're getting a little off the point here?

JimSox said:

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Cal Strong! said:

---

Oakbear said:

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"The difference is that football costs more money than other sports and I'm not sure if the humanities actually cost more than the sciences (probably not)."

I wonder about that, does a prof in the humanities earn less than a science prof?

often the sciences get grant money which can cut costs

in some cases science discoveries lead to royalties for Cal-Berkeley (sic) which I don't think are generated by humanity profs

hard to measure, but you seem to assume that your statement is true

---

Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.

Humanities profs also get large grants, though they are typically not as large or numerous as STEM grants.

But Humanities profs don't require crazy expensive labs and equipment. They just need a dry erase marker every semester and a MacBook every couple of years.

---

So clearly we should drop the sciences and keep the humanities.
Do you think maybe we're getting a little off the point here?

---

Cal Strong never advocated dropping the sciences.

He just pointing out that neither the "supply/demand" nor the "costs" arguments support the notion that we should reduce the humanities.

There is a ton of demand for the humanities, and their cost is less than the sciences.

Oakbear said:

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but you seem to assume that your statement is true

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Why would you say that? I specifically said "I'm not sure" in my original post.

But if you want to know why I thought the humanities were probably less expensive to fund, it's the reasons mentioned by others here: professors making less, classes requiring less in labs/equipment, etc.

Cal Strong! said:

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JimSox said:

---

Cal Strong! said:

---

Oakbear said:

---

"The difference is that football costs more money than other sports and I'm not sure if the humanities actually cost more than the sciences (probably not)."

I wonder about that, does a prof in the humanities earn less than a science prof?

often the sciences get grant money which can cut costs

in some cases science discoveries lead to royalties for Cal-Berkeley (sic) which I don't think are generated by humanity profs

hard to measure, but you seem to assume that your statement is true

---

Humanities profs on average get MUCH less.

Humanities profs also get large grants, though they are typically not as large or numerous as STEM grants.

But Humanities profs don't require crazy expensive labs and equipment. They just need a dry erase marker every semester and a MacBook every couple of years.

---

So clearly we should drop the sciences and keep the humanities.
Do you think maybe we're getting a little off the point here?

---

Cal Strong never advocated dropping the sciences.

He just pointing out that neither the "supply/demand" nor the "costs" arguments support the notion that we should reduce the humanities.

There is a ton of demand for the humanities, and their cost is less than the sciences.

---

Sorry. I was being facetious. Obviously a school with one of the most acclaimed physics programs in the world should not drop the sciences.
My point is that this thread is getting off the point.

Sports is more akin to the Theatre Arts Department. There are tickets sold for shows, but generally tge department is subsidized by the university or by individual donors. Some people who take drama go on to be professional actors or go into a profession related to theatre, movies or television, but others don't. They took other classes, maybe even majored in something different and pursue that or fall back on that.

Similarly universities and JCs up and down the state have sports departments, I doubt any are self/sustaining.

The philosophical question of whether universities should have sports or drama is a side issue. Questioning humanities? We are the UNIVERSITY of California, not California Technical Institute. Sports and entertainment are big business and lucrative professions. UCLA's Film School is a huge part of their appeal. Rather than reject sports, we should go all in.

We should develop the best sports management program in the country as part of the Haas School of Business.

If there are slots open and preference given for Cal football and basketball players it would be a huge draw for players to Cal, especially grad transfers.

We could clean house from deadwood like Knowlton and his hired hacks, get rid of Learfield, and our athletic department could largely be an academic department, an innovations lab for students to try out their ideas in marketing, management, recruiting, even scouting and strategy all overseen by the best professors and guest lecturers in the business and backed up with hard data science. Moneyball applied to the college level but with even more rigor. Advanced statistical analysis on opponent tendencies, recruits, coaching hires, everything. Most work could be done by student interns, but we would be cutting edge. Marketing to students, alums and the community at large. Growing the California brand. All great, marketable experience for the "real world." Moreover, with the athletics department as an academic institute, there might be less obvious conflict with the academic side.

More student involvement would draw in more student interest. Most of our traditions, from fight songs to cars students were created by people who were students at the time. We used to have student song contests. For the last 40 years I've thought we should revive that with student rap contests and/or dance contests but with a California/Cal theme backed by the band. They could begin on the field before the game, get the students in early, students could vote on their phones then have the two top vote getters match off at halftime or during breaks instead of growls contests and BART car racing. Have a division for local high schools too. That would attract more local high school interest and fandom.

LarsBear74 said:

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What you said: Off topic, but personally, I think where college sports has arrived and where it is heading, I think colleges should just license their name to a professional business who runs football and basketball. I don't think it even matters anymore if the players are students. Offer an education if you want. Don't if you don't. Just pay them to wear the laundry and let's stop pretending this has anything to do with student athletics.

I've been saying this for awhile now, and agree with it. Let's stop trying to run minor league NFL programs in our universities. Turn em loose, let em run things as needed, and pay a franchise/rent fee back to the University for the privilege of wearing the unis. And oh by the way, let em seek tie-ins with NFL franchises for additional support. After all, it's not like the NFL isn't benefitting from a "free" minor league system.

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This is such a broad sword solution to a environment that has more nuance than people see. The vast majority of players will not be professional football players. These players should be looking to use their talent to access opportunities to earn degrees that can positively affect their futures.

Think about Evan Weaver and how impactful he was as a player at Cal. He has struggled to be a contributor at the next level. The nuanced system that we have with NIL creating an enhanced student athlete experience for those with impact talent makes sense and can work sustainably in the long term.

With the right coach a college football program can definitely teach the type of discipline and work ethic that when coupled with a education and degree from one of the top universities in the world can be a success template for a young person regardless if the cards work out for them as a professional athlete.