Gone is Martin Jarmond<\/a>, the embattled athletic director whose six-year tenure Bruins fans will feel, well, forever.<\/p>\n His legacy will be most remembered for two painful gut punches to Bruins tradition.<\/p>\n R.I.P. Pacific-12 Conference.<\/p>\n Hold on to your seat at the Rose Bowl.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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<\/a> and take a seat at the Big Ten table in 2024.<\/p>\n And it still boggles the mind that UCLA<\/a> \u2014 when it had so little going for its football program \u2014 would even consider turning its back on the Rose Bowl. It\u2019s only one of the most revered sporting venues in the world.<\/p>\n Yes, we know UCLA\u2019s athletic department needed \u2014 and needs \u2014 the money.<\/p>\n We know that at the end of the 2024 fiscal year, it carried $51.8 million in debt<\/a> and needed a university bailout. We also see that all that Big Ten revenue has only put a dent in the deficit, per Frenk\u2019s message to the Bruins community Monday.<\/p>\n \u201cUCLA Athletics currently carries a significant financial deficit,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand its current path is not sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n And we know that UCLA doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t disputed the move in court.<\/p>\n We know \u2014 and I hope Tim Harris<\/a>, UCLA\u2019s new pro-bono chief executive and director of athletics, knows \u2014 that what sells college sports is its tradition. Its history. Its soul. And all the trimmings.<\/p>\n It is, as Frenk wrote, the fact that: \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Tim Harris, the former president of business operations for the Lakers, will serve as UCLA\u2019s new pro-bono CEO and director of athletics.<\/p>\n (Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n NIL. Revenue-sharing. Conference realignment. Rampant roster realignment.<\/p>\n And now we have pro football players going back to school, maybe.<\/p>\n But maybe you can\u2019t rip the beating heart out of the patient and expect it to keep marching in with big-ticket donations.<\/p>\n Perhaps you shouldn\u2019t expect to appeal to people\u2019s sense of pride and nostalgia if they don\u2019t recognize the place or product, if they no longer identify with it.<\/p>\n You should question which sponsor wants to commit serious dollars to an athletic department that doesn\u2019t fully commit to pursuing excellence in the most important endeavor of football.<\/p>\n Because you can bank on the fact that, in L.A., people won\u2019t turn up or tune in for flops and failure. Mediocrity won\u2019t move anyone. And under three coaches in the past six years, the Bruins\u2019 football team went 36-33 and notched only one bowl victory, in the now-defunct LA Bowl.<\/p>\n Fans were fed up with Chip Kelly<\/a> \u2014 whose teams went 35-34 \u2014 long before he abandoned his post for the offensive coordinator job at Ohio State<\/a> in February 2024. Financial constraints might have prevented Jarmond from firing Kelly sooner, but those limitations didn\u2019t prevent him from extending Kelly\u2019s contract<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n Or from locking up Mick Cronin through 2030, even though UCLA\u2019s prickly basketball coach embarrasses the university annually and hasn\u2019t reached a Sweet 16 since 2023.<\/p>\n The only good thing about the abrupt DeShaun Foster hiring in the wake of Kelly\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The result of football\u2019s fallibility: Perfectly dreadful attendance. A record-low 12,383 fans braved the heat at UCLA\u2019s 2022 season opener and 14,093 the game after. Last season, UCLA averaged 37,282 fans at the Rose Bowl \u2014 41.6% of the stadium\u2019s 89,702 capacity.<\/p>\n UCLA football coach Bob Chesney, left, sits next to UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond during a news conference in December.<\/p>\n (Marcio Jose Sanchez \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n The problem wasn\u2019t the Bowl, mind you. It\u2019s what was in it.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s biggest donors. And then, no immediate apology.<\/p>\n Lack of accountability, lack of imagination. Lack of authority when it came to getting Kelly pulling in the right direction with the department\u2019s NIL efforts.<\/p>\n UCLA celebrated nine national championships across sports on Jarmond\u2019s watch, but his tenure will be remembered for a lack of success where it most mattered.<\/p>\n The Bruins lost too many football games under Jarmond \u2014 who got lost chasing the almighty buck \u2014 and he lost a fan base like a coach loses a locker room.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good vibes only. As if determined to start the Bob Chesney era on a purely positive note, UCLA…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[38045,8950,178064,22087,4690,11154,22089,48,52,51,47928,47,50,49,178063,178066,592,10657,278,178062,178065],"class_list":["post-449959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-athletic-department","tag-athletic-director","tag-bruins-tradition","tag-chip-kelly","tag-coach","tag-fan","tag-football-program","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lack","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-martin-jarmond","tag-money-woe","tag-people","tag-rose-bowl","tag-season","tag-ucla-legacy","tag-university-bailout"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Tim](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788269536_890_.jpeg\")
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