Football Team Dominates Fiscally

UCLA had won seven consecutive football games, was in the top 10 nationally and there was a week off to turn the whole thing into a happening.

On Nov. 15, Washington was coming to town.

The budget had said the game would do a gate of $883,005, and the budget had been right all season.

“Coming into the Washington game, the sum of the first five games, we were $232 under our budget,” said Steve Salm, the university’s chancellor of the athletic exchequer. “We were about dead even. We’ve never done that before.

“And then the Washington game messed me up.”

Attendance was 85,697, or about $1,098,000 in Salm-speak, and there was about $215,000 of found money.

Enough to pay for men’s golf . . . or women’s golf . . . or the tennis programs of either sex. Certainly women’s soccer, or both water polo teams, or the weight room that is used by everybody.

It was football doing football’s job, or maybe doing men’s basketball’s job for a day. Those sports support themselves and also provide most of the money for 19 others at UCLA . . . and most everywhere else where they play Division I football.

“We’re not a business,” said Salm, but the majority of the nation’s businesses do quite well on budgets smaller than the university’s $26,125,123 for athletics.

That rationale, used by Salm and Peter Dalis, UCLA’s athletic director, tends to blur the impact of football and men’s basketball, the linchpins of the overall program.

“We have a lot of expenses that would be difficult to assign,” Salm says, specifying much of the $8,774,431 spent in athletic support and administration.

Maybe difficult, but a not-so-rough estimate would show that the football program had direct costs of $6,979,941 to run, a lot but far below the $12,879,196 it brings to UCLA.

That’s 27% of the athletic expense against 49.3% of the revenue. Folks in business would call that a healthy profit.

And men’s basketball is also more than fit. The program brings in $9,267,682, or about 35.5% of all athletic dollars and spends $2,195,221, or about 8.5% of the budget.

Even better, UCLA gets $750,000 plus the price of 325 airplane tickets as its Pacific 10 Conference expense account for playing Texas A&M; in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 1, and the Bruins could even make a few dollars there if they could peddle all of their 12,500 game tickets at $55 apiece.

It’s a holiday reward for a 9-2 season, and there’s no resentment among the other sports “because [football] generates a significant amount of revenue,” said Betsy Stephenson, an associate athletic director in charge of most of the sports that aren’t football or men’s basketball.

“[Other sports’ coaches and players] know what the status of a highly ranked football team does for the institution.”

And they also know their existence nationally depends on football and basketball.

Once the other sports were called “minor,” and some were called “women’s sports,” but perhaps to give them a little extra cachet they are called “Olympic” now. Besides money from football and basketball, they get $2,265,544 from student registration fees.

Still, none of them pay for themselves.

“I suppose any sport that doesn’t create as much revenue as it costs is a money-drainer,” Stephenson said. “But we have a broad-based program and we are competing at a national level, so we don’t look at it as draining money. It has a role in the university.”

That role is keeping the school’s name alive in athletic circles that don’t involve tackling or jump shots, and it’s working. UCLA has won 16 national championships in the 1990s, but none in football and only one in men’s basketball.

When the university’s athletic department was $3.3 million in the hole 10 years ago, Dalis decided to find out if such a broad-based program was worth it. After a committee studied the situation, two choices were available.

One was cutting four sports.

“The alternative to cutting Olympic sports was cutting sports across the board and not competing nationally, not recruiting nationally,” Salm says. “The coaches and students all said, ‘No, we want to compete nationally.’ ”

Says Dalis, “By my recollection, if we hadn’t done something, the projected deficit by the year 2000 was $15-17 million. Part of that was an increase by the state in the cost of a scholarship. Tuition went up, dorms went up, and whatever it was, we had to carry it.”

What is often misunderstood, because UCLA is a state university, is that athletic scholarships aren’t free. The department, in essence, writes a check for $11,500 for every California athlete, $19,300 for those from out of state.

To make ends meet, men’s and women’s crew, men’s gymnastics and men’s swimming were dropped.

To show there were no hard feelings, some of the axed athletes showed up at a football practice one day in 1994 and held an impromptu pep rally before the USC game.

To show there were some hard feelings, some of them showed up in a Santa Monica courtroom for what turned out to be a futile lawsuit.

Shortly after the bloodletting, all of the remaining sports were brought up to national speed.

They are fully funded now, which means all the scholarships the NCAA allows are offered.

And there is more.

“It used to be different, but about three years ago we changed all the per-diem amounts [for all sports] to be the same,” Salm said. “The preseason housing, winter-break housing and away-game travel [and the $29-a-day per diem], it’s the same for all of them.

“Before . . . there were substantial differences. Quality-of-hotel differences on the road, differences in how often we bought uniforms, differences in shoes. . . . [Now other sports] don’t have anything to complain about, I think, because there aren’t any differences really.”

There are, but not in treatment, and one of the reasons few can resent the stature afforded football and men’s basketball is the way coaches in other sports measure their lot in the athletic hierarchy.

“They look at their peer group, their competitors, not at an internal group, and they measure it against that,” Stephenson said.

The differences show up on the other side of the ledger.

There are no admission charges at golf matches, track and field and swim meets, water polo games and several other sports at UCLA.

The school charges to see women’s basketball and gymnastics and soccer, baseball and volleyball games. But women’s basketball spends about $682,000 more than it takes in, and baseball operates at a deficit of about $371,000.

And, though marketing emphasis on Olympic sports has increased over the last several years, those numbers are going to remain high.

“I think women’s basketball can [generate more revenue],” Stephenson said, casting an envious eye toward Washington and Stanford, the two Pacific 10 Conference schools that make money on the women’s game.

“I think baseball can. Women’s volleyball. Men’s and women’s soccer.

“I don’t think those sports will ever be at a point where they contribute enough revenue to pay for themselves. But certainly, they can contribute to the bottom line.”

With an eye toward increasing revenue, Dalis, Stephenson and other athletic officials are looking at a proposal to carve a soccer facility out of Drake Stadium, UCLA’s track and field complex.

But even then, the bottom line is going to be the bottom line, and it all comes down to two sports.

Men’s basketball sells about 11,000 season tickets, about all the school can fit into Pauley Pavilion and still have a few seats to sell on game day.

Football sold about 28,000 season tickets this season, and a 9-2 season and a Cotton Bowl game mean everybody’s happy. It translates into more money next year.

“Our pattern is that, if we have a losing football season, our season-ticket sales are impacted by about 5%,” Dalis says. “ If we have a winning season, we realize about a 5% increase on the other end.”

A 9-2 season, then, means about 29,400 season tickets sold next season. Another successful season takes UCLA to near 31,000, which is one of the reasons everybody is smiling these days at the Morgan Center, the school’s athletic administration building.

The Bruins are winning, and they are recruiting hard for a bright future.

And besides, “I’d rather be 9-2 than 2-9,” says Rick Purdy, associate athletic director for development, who helps generate donations that total about $3.5 million annually.

And about $3.25 million of that is attributable to football and basketball.

“You don’t see a significant increase in giving with a successful season, but everybody feels better when you win,” Purdy says.

COTTON BOWL

UCLA vs TEXAS A&M;

When: Thursday

Where: Dallas

TV: Channel 2

Time: 10:30 a.m.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Money Trail

A look at the athletic budget at UCLA:

Revenue:

Football: 49.3%

Men’s Basketball: 35.5%

Rest of Revenue: 15.2%

Total: $26,125,123

*

Expenses

Football: 27%

Men’s Basketball: 8.5%

Administration: 34%

Rest of Expenses: 30.5%

Total: $25,843,308

(Please see newspaper for full chart information)