Good vibes only.
As if determined to start the Bob Chesney era on a purely positive note, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk removed the athletic department’s most negative asset Monday, days before the Bruins football team opens its season at California.
Gone is Martin Jarmond, the embattled athletic director whose six-year tenure Bruins fans will feel, well, forever.
His legacy will be most remembered for two painful gut punches to Bruins tradition.
R.I.P. Pacific-12 Conference.
Hold on to your seat at the Rose Bowl.
It’s still heartbreaking and disorienting, thinking about the demise of the old Pac-12 and all the longstanding rivalries that disappeared when Jarmond agreed to go with USC and take a seat at the Big Ten table in 2024.
And it still boggles the mind that UCLA — when it had so little going for its football program — would even consider turning its back on the Rose Bowl. It’s only one of the most revered sporting venues in the world.
Yes, we know UCLA’s athletic department needed — and needs — the money.
We know that at the end of the 2024 fiscal year, it carried $51.8 million in debt and needed a university bailout. We also see that all that Big Ten revenue has only put a dent in the deficit, per Frenk’s message to the Bruins community Monday.
“UCLA Athletics currently carries a significant financial deficit,” he wrote, “and its current path is not sustainable.”
And we know that UCLA doesn’t really belong in the Big Ten. Or in the sterile, professional confines of SoFi Stadium, where Jarmond would have the Bruins playing this season if the city of Pasadena hadn’t disputed the move in court.
We know — and I hope Tim Harris, UCLA’s new pro-bono chief executive and director of athletics, knows — that what sells college sports is its tradition. Its history. Its soul. And all the trimmings.
It is, as Frenk wrote, the fact that: “For generations, UCLA has produced champions and Olympic legends. We are the university of John Wooden. Our student-athletes have inspired generations of Bruins and captured the hearts of people around the world.”
That athletic legacy is especially important in this turbulent time, when it seems like not a week goes by without another drastic disruption in the way college sports are run.
NIL. Revenue-sharing. Conference realignment. Rampant roster realignment.
And now we have pro football players going back to school, maybe.
But maybe you can’t rip the beating heart out of the patient and expect it to keep marching in with big-ticket donations.
Perhaps you shouldn’t expect to appeal to people’s sense of pride and nostalgia if they don’t recognize the place or product, if they no longer identify with it.
You should question which sponsor wants to commit serious dollars to an athletic department that doesn’t fully commit to pursuing excellence in the most important endeavor of football.
Because you can bank on the fact that, in L.A., people won’t turn up or tune in for flops and failure. Mediocrity won’t move anyone. And under three coaches in the past six years, the Bruins’ football team went 36-33 and notched only one bowl victory, in the now-defunct LA Bowl.
Fans were fed up with Chip Kelly — whose teams went 35-34 — long before he abandoned his post for the offensive coordinator job at Ohio State in February 2024. Financial constraints might have prevented Jarmond from firing Kelly sooner, but those limitations didn’t prevent him from extending Kelly’s contract in 2023.
Or from locking up Mick Cronin through 2030, even though UCLA’s prickly basketball coach embarrasses the university annually and hasn’t reached a Sweet 16 since 2023.
The only good thing about the abrupt DeShaun Foster hiring in the wake of Kelly’s departure was how abruptly he was fired. He was excused after three embarrassing losses to start his second season; he went 5-10 as a head coach.
The result of football’s fallibility: Perfectly dreadful attendance. A record-low 12,383 fans braved the heat at UCLA’s 2022 season opener and 14,093 the game after. Last season, UCLA averaged 37,282 fans at the Rose Bowl — 41.6% of the stadium’s 89,702 capacity.
The problem wasn’t the Bowl, mind you. It’s what was in it.
There were mighty blunders off the field too under Jarmond, including an email that went out to donors that came with an attachment revealing personal information and spending tallies of the department’s biggest donors. And then, no immediate apology.
Lack of accountability, lack of imagination. Lack of authority when it came to getting Kelly pulling in the right direction with the department’s NIL efforts.
UCLA celebrated nine national championships across sports on Jarmond’s watch, but his tenure will be remembered for a lack of success where it most mattered.
The Bruins lost too many football games under Jarmond — who got lost chasing the almighty buck — and he lost a fan base like a coach loses a locker room.
Wave some sage around, because starting this week, Chesney will get to enjoy a clean slate as UCLA positions itself to profit, it hopes, from some positive momentum.
The post Martin Jarmond’s UCLA legacy marred by football turmoil, money woes and donor blunders appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
