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Friday, September 15, 2023

Sources Believe

As we have previously noted, Berkeley's move (flight?) to the ACC is on the closed-door agenda for the Regents next week.* Jon Wilner of the Mercury News notes the $$$ implications for UCLA:

The University of California regents will discuss Cal’s move into the Atlantic Coast Conference next week on UCLA’s campus. It’s an appropriate location given that the governing board is expected to consider whether to impose a subsidy on the Bruins — the so-called Berkeley tax, or Cal-imony... Sources believe it will be discussed in detail.

...Expecting the depleted Pac-12 to lose significant media revenue without the Los Angeles market, the regents voted in December to retain the authority to force the Westwood campus to subsidize Berkeley. The measure reads as follows:

“The President will return to the Regents at a future meeting, after Pac-12 media agreements are finalized, with a recommendation for a contribution by UCLA to the Berkeley campus in the range of $2 million to $10 million, to be used to enhance student athlete support at that campus. Such recommendation will be based on the best available information on projected revenues for both campuses. The Board of Regents will have final approval over the contribution amount.”

Since then, the Pac-12 has collapsed, with Cal (and Stanford) fleeing to the ACC starting next summer. But to gain admittance to their new home, the Bay Area schools were forced to accept reduced revenue from the ACC’s media rights contract with ESPN for nine years. The discounted rate reportedly begins at 30 percent of a full share.

...Instead of the $25 million to $30 million they would have received annually from the Pac-12 — or as a full-share member of the ACC — the Bears are staring at just seven figures in media rights revenue into the early 2030s. This, for an athletic department that requires more than $20 million annually from central campus just to balance its books...

“There certainly are financial challenges to this agreement,” Cal chancellor Carol Christ said the day the Bears joined the ACC. “We believe this was the best agreement in financial terms that we could have made and look forward to working through the challenges.” How might Cal “work through” the challenges? Christ declined to provide details. “We’ve barely begun to think about strategy,” she said. “There’s a piece of it that’s missing, which is what the regents decide about UCLA’s contribution to Cal.” ...

Full story at https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/09/12/uc-regents-meeting-to-include-discussion-of-cals-move-into-the-acc-which-could-be-costly-for-ucla/.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-regents-will-be-back-at-ucla-sept.html. Scroll down to Sept. 21.

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