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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.
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.
UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk announced Monday that Martin Jarmond’s tenure as UCLA athletic director is over, replacing him with former Lakers executive Tim Harris.
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.
