When UCLA left the Pac-12 in 2024, the athletics department had a chance to parlay Big Ten cash into financial solvency. Instead, the affiliation change only exacerbated the department’s deteriorating financial portfolio.Whether it was mismanagement, new expenditures related to paying athletes or the lack of revenue generation — or all three — UCLA athletics under former athletic director Martin Jarmond turned a financial pothole into an ever-expanding money pit. On Monday, six years of massive deficits, soaring well past $200 million, prompted UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk to fire Jarmond and install UCLA men’s soccer alum and former Los Angeles Lakers executive Tim Harris to run the athletics department.“UCLA Athletics currently carries a significant financial deficit, and its current path is not sustainable,” Frenk said in a letter to the UCLA community. “Now is the moment to build a model for Athletics that protects the breadth of our program, creates new opportunities for student-athletes and coaches, and supports itself through the revenue it generates. I believe UCLA should help lead the transformation of intercollegiate athletics: our future must be shaped by purpose — not by pressure.”While the timing of Jarmond’s departure seems awkward with the Bruins’ football team opening its season at Cal on Saturday night, it’s also necessary to reset one of college athletics’ worst financial situations.UCLA (and USC) entered the Big Ten in 2024 as a fully vested member and did not have to wait six years to receive full payments, unlike Nebraska, Maryland, Rutgers, Oregon and Washington. In UCLA’s final Pac-12 season, it received $19.93 million in media rights revenue. When it joined the Big Ten, that number more than tripled to $61.26 million in the 2025 fiscal year and $76 million in fiscal 2026. That should have helped the Bruins get back on track financially. Yet the deficits never subsided.The final 2026 numbers are not complete, but Frenk’s statement assures UCLA’s economic trajectory remains untenable. From the 2020 fiscal year onward, UCLA athletics spent $222.27 million more than it brought in, all of which was covered by the university. Within those deficits were so many troubling signs that it would be tough for any manager to survive. Yet Jarmond, who was hired in May 2020, appeared almost blasé about the financial issues in an interview with The Athletic this summer.“One of the things that I think is a misnomer about the finances,” he said, “is that college athletics expenses are skyrocketing now, and it started a couple years ago, and it doesn’t seem to slow down. The Big Ten has given us a stronger financial foundation, but we are like most schools in the country that are subsidized to an extent by the university.”Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Alston vs. NCAA in 2021, many athletic departments have shifted from self-supporting to receiving university appropriations. But UCLA’s deficit numbers during the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years were staggering.Over those two years, the department spent $73.48 million more than it brought in, which is troubling enough. But its listed income includes $52.5 million in direct university support and student fees, bringing UCLA’s campus contribution to athletics to more than $125 million combined for 2024 and 2025. The fiscal 2026 financial statement — which includes $20.8 million in athlete pay expenditures — is not available.UCLA is woefully behind its Big Ten colleagues in many other areas, especially in contributions and ticket sales. In the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, UCLA totaled $18.73 million in football ticket sales, which was behind what eight other Big Ten public schools reported in fiscal 2025 alone. The donation numbers are even worse. UCLA collected $27.3 million in gifts over that two-year time frame, which was behind what 10 Big Ten public schools recorded in just 2025.It’s not that UCLA is down competitively; it won NCAA titles last season in women’s basketball, men’s water polo and beach volleyball. Its men’s golf teams finished second nationally, the softball team qualified for the Women’s College World Series, the baseball team was ranked No. 1 for much of the season and its gymnastics team reached the NCAA semifinals. Outside of football, which had two coaching changes in 18 months, the Bruins are the Big Ten’s most dominant athletic program.Therein lies the juxtaposition: How can such a successful athletic program located in the nation’s second-largest media market struggle so badly to generate revenue? Harris’ charge is to mine UCLA’s advantages and turn them into revenue.“Tim knows what it takes to grow a world-class sports organization and global brand, and he holds longstanding relationships throughout Los Angeles and globally,” Frenk said in his statement. “He brings decades of experience in creating partnerships and new sources of revenue, along with a personal focus on centering the student-athlete experience.“Tim will develop a new strategy to grow revenue through partnerships, licensing and other ventures, while ensuring that our student-athletes and coaches have the required support to compete at the highest level.”There are still several challenges for UCLA. It plays football at the Rose Bowl, which strips the athletic department of significant revenue opportunities. Los Angeles provides both visibility and anonymity with two franchises in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL within the metro, archrival USC and the world’s largest entertainment complex. So, any successful venture faces competition for attention and eyeballs. But to move forward, UCLA has to somehow stop the financial bleeding, especially for a university that ran its own $220 million deficit in fiscal 2026.Jarmond is owed $6.5 million on a five-year contract through 2029. But his firing shows that even subsidized athletic departments have limits for how far in debt they can go.