Musing on the history of the athletics deficit

Yesterday, we summarized the Regents meeting of May 13th, which included the Special Committee on Athletics and its review of UCLA and its athletics budget deficit. The LA Times ran a piece on the odd history of athletics finance at UCLA: [excerpt]

In his later years, John Wooden liked to muse about one oddity of his first 12 years as UCLA’s basketball coach. His paychecks were always signed by the student body president. One of those presidents, Rafer Johnson, also played for Wooden, meaning that Johnson in effect could have been considered his coach’s boss. The arrangement stemmed from an ethos that gave UCLA students a large measure of control over their own campus from the 1920s through the late 1950s. The students ran the campus bookstore, the cafeteria and intercollegiate athletics, all of it managed by an organization called Associated Students UCLA that was overseen by a student-majority board of directors.

Change came after a dispute about abandoning the Pacific Coast Conference as the result of a scandal involving payments to players. The University of California regents, irked by the lack of direct authority that the chancellors at UCLA and sister school UC Berkeley had over the intercollegiate athletic programs at each campus, decided that starting in the summer of 1960, the athletic departments at each campus would be university departments reporting directly to their respective chancellor. That move came with the mandate that each athletic program was considered an auxiliary enterprise similar to campus parking and housing, with the expectation that they would be similarly self-sustaining.

This decision came with significant financial fallout for ASUCLA. Previously, the profits from the school’s athletic teams subsidized the losses of the campus bookstore and the cafeteria. Where were the students going to get the money to keep those businesses afloat now? John Sandbrook, who later became assistant chancellor under chancellor Charles Young, told The Times that the decision was made to give the bookstore — still run by ASUCLA — control over the logo rights for UCLA T-shirts, sweatshirts and other merchandise as part of an arrangement that still exists 65 years later. “These legacy decisions got made for reasons that made sense at the time,” Sandbrook said, “but because of inertia never were modified.” ...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2025-05-14/a-makeup-call-how-ucla-athletic-department-finances-suffered-from-legacy-deals.

Of course, the larger problem is that running a de facto commercial sports operation - which has to support athletic sports that aren't moneymakers - won't be fixed with T-shirt revenue.

See also: https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2025-05-13/how-does-this-thing-not-sink-bob-myers-questions-ucla-athletics-finances.