Martin Jarmond’s UCLA legacy marred by football

Good vibes only.

As if decided to start the Bob Chesney period on a purely optimistic notice, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk eliminated the athletic division’s most destructive asset Monday, days before the Bruins football workforce opens its season at California.

Gone is Martin Jarmond, the embattled athletic director whose six-year tenure Bruins followers will really feel, properly, perpetually.

His legacy shall be most remembered for two painful intestine punches to Bruins custom.

R.I.P. Pacific-12 Conference.

Hold on to your seat at the Rose Bowl.

It’s still heartbreaking and disorienting, considering about the demise of the outdated Pac-12 and all the longstanding rivalries that disappeared when Jarmond agreed to go with USC and take a seat at the Big Ten desk in 2024.

And it still boggles the thoughts that UCLA — when it had so little going for its football program — would even take into account turning its back on the Rose Bowl. It’s only one of the most revered sporting venues in the world.

Yes, we all know UCLA’s athletic division needed — and wants — the money.

We know that at the end of the 2024 fiscal yr, it carried $51.8 million in debt and needed a college bailout. We also see that all that Big Ten income has only put a dent in the deficit, per Frenk’s message to the Bruins neighborhood Monday.

“UCLA Athletics currently carries a significant financial deficit,” he wrote, “and its current path is not sustainable.”

And we all know that UCLA doesn’t actually belong in the Big Ten. Or in the sterile, skilled confines of SoFi Stadium, where Jarmond would have the Bruins enjoying this season if the town of Pasadena hadn’t disputed the transfer in court.

We know — and I hope Tim Harris, UCLA’s new pro-bono chief govt and director of athletics, is aware of — that what sells faculty sports activities is its custom. Its historical past. 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 particularly important in this turbulent time, when it looks as if not a week goes by without another drastic disruption in the way in which faculty sports activities are run.

NIL. Revenue-sharing. Conference realignment. Rampant roster realignment.

And now we’ve professional football gamers going back to college, perhaps.

But perhaps you’ll be able to’t rip the beating coronary heart out of the affected person and anticipate it to keep marching in with big-ticket donations.

Perhaps you shouldn’t anticipate to appeal to people’s sense of satisfaction and nostalgia if they don’t acknowledge the place or product, if they no longer determine with it.

You ought to query which sponsor desires to commit critical {dollars} to an athletic division that doesn’t absolutely commit to pursuing excellence in the most important endeavor of football.

Because you’ll be able to bank on the fact that, in L.A., people received’t flip up or tune in for flops and failure. Mediocrity received’t transfer anybody. And under three coaches in the past six years, the Bruins’ football workforce went 36-33 and notched only one bowl victory, in the now-defunct LA Bowl.

Fans have been fed up with Chip Kelly — whose groups went 35-34 — long before he deserted his post for the offensive coordinator job at Ohio State in February 2024. Financial constraints might need prevented Jarmond from firing Kelly sooner, but those limitations didn’t stop 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 college yearly and hasn’t reached a Sweet 16 since 2023.

The only good factor 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 outcome of football’s fallibility: Perfectly dreadful attendance. A record-low 12,383 followers braved the heat at UCLA’s 2022 season opener and 14,093 the sport after. Last season, UCLA averaged 37,282 followers at the Rose Bowl — 41.6% of the stadium’s 89,702 capability.

UCLA football coach Bob Chesney, left, sits next to UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond during a news convention in December.

(Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)

The drawback wasn’t the Bowl, thoughts you. It’s what was in it.

There have been mighty blunders off the sphere too under Jarmond, including an electronic mail that went out to donors that got here with an attachment revealing personal data and spending tallies of the division’s greatest donors. And then, no quick apology.

Lack of accountability, lack of creativeness. Lack of authority when it got here to getting Kelly pulling in the fitting direction with the division’s NIL efforts.

UCLA celebrated 9 national championships across sports activities on Jarmond’s watch, but his tenure shall be remembered for a lack of success where it most mattered.

The Bruins misplaced too many football video games under Jarmond — who acquired misplaced chasing the almighty buck — and he misplaced a fan base like a coach loses a locker room.

Wave some sage around, because beginning this week, Chesney will get to get pleasure from a clean slate as UCLA positions itself to revenue, it hopes, from some optimistic momentum.