UCLA Bets Its Athletic Future on an Unpaid Lakers Executive

UCLA fired athletic director Martin Jarmond on Monday and named former Lakers executive Tim Harris as unpaid CEO and athletic director. Harris, 64, takes over five days before football season, on a pro bono basis, after Chancellor Julio Frenk told campus the department’s path is not sustainable.

The school is wagering that a Lakers business president who was already consulting in Westwood can make athletics pay for itself, after seven years in the red totaling $241.1 million.

A Campus Letter Names an Unpaid CEO

Frenk’s August 31 message to the Bruin community framed the change as a new path forward for UCLA Athletics. Jarmond, 46, left the same day, six years after he arrived from Boston College to replace Dan Guerrero. Frenk thanked him for that run and pointed to three NCAA championship titles last year, including the first by the women’s basketball team.

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

Julio Frenk, UCLA chancellor, campus letter, August 31, 2026

Frenk wrote that UCLA must lead in a market reshaped by name, image and likeness deals and new ways athletes get paid. He asked Harris to serve as CEO and Director of UCLA Athletics and said he was grateful Harris would do the work at no charge. The letter set no end date and did not announce a search.

Harris’s assignment, in Frenk’s words, is a new strategy to grow revenue through partnerships, licensing and other ventures, while keeping support for athletes and coaches high enough to compete. The title is the tell. UCLA did not hire another career athletic director. It hired a business chief and asked him to keep the full slate of sports.

Harris Was Already Inside the Department

Harris is a 1989 UCLA sociology graduate who played goalkeeper for the men’s soccer team. He spent more than 35 years with the Lakers, including a long stretch as president of business operations, and was the driving force behind the franchise’s local television deal with Spectrum SportsNet. He told staff in February that the season would be his last after Mark Walter bought a controlling stake at a $10 billion valuation, and he was among Jeanie Buss’s inner circle who received a major bonus after that sale.

By mid-August he was already on campus. Harris confirmed he was consulting for UCLA, and people familiar with the work said he was looking at revenue across campus operations, including athletics, as a volunteer. He had been auditing the athletic department before Frenk put his name on the door. The Monday announcement read like a shock. The preceding 11 days read like a handoff that had already started.

HOW HARRIS GOT THE JOB

1. February 2026: Harris tells Lakers staff the season will be his last after more than 35 years with the club.
2. June 1, 2026: Jarmond meets UCLA’s Council on Planning and Budget with campus finance staff to discuss the athletics hole.
3. June 10, 2026: Academic Senate chair Megan McEvoy asks Frenk for a concrete plan by July 31 to cut the central subsidy.
4. August 20, 2026: Harris confirms he is consulting for UCLA on a volunteer basis.
5. August 31, 2026: Frenk names Harris CEO and director of athletics and says Jarmond is out the same day.

UCLA had already doubled down on Jarmond. A November 14, 2024 newsroom release said the school had extended his contract through 2029, a three-year add-on finalized in spring 2024 on top of the six-year deal he signed in July 2020. Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt praised him then for steps “to shore up the financial health of our athletics enterprise.” The remaining package on that deal has been put at $6.5 million, and it runs through June 30, 2029. Frenk’s letter did not say what portion Jarmond will be paid.

Seven Years and $241.1 Million in Shortfalls

The department has finished in the red every year from 2019 through 2025. Jarmond arrived in July 2020 and has said he inherited a hole. The pandemic year, fiscal 2021, was the worst at $62.5 million. Big Ten media cash later narrowed the annual gap, but it did not close it. Fiscal 2025 still ended $21.6 million short even after a $31.1 million campus subsidy.

UCLA ATHLETICS YEARLY SHORTFALLS

Take the subsidy out of fiscal 2025 and the department generated $120.7 million against $173.4 million in costs. The Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, built from NCAA financial reports, is the ledger behind those lines. Faculty later told Frenk that athletics had the worst deficit of any college program in the country on the 2024 data.

UCLA’s Own Revenue Fell After the Big Ten Move

UCLA left the Pac-12 for the Big Ten in August 2024, and the conference check did what it was supposed to do. Media and NCAA revenue jumped from $41.2 million in fiscal 2023 to $77.3 million in fiscal 2025, an 88 percent rise. In its first Big Ten season the school collected $61.3 million from media rights, up from $19.9 million in its last Pac-12 year.

Everything UCLA had to raise itself moved the other way. Ticket sales, donor gifts and sponsorship all fell while travel and staff pay climbed. That is the hole Harris is being asked to fill with partnerships and licensing, because the conference money already arrived and the books still did not balance.

PAC-12 YEAR VERSUS BIG TEN YEAR

Donor contributions in fiscal 2025 were $13.5 million, 14th among 16 public Big Ten schools, against a league median of $34.1 million. Ohio State reported $69.0 million the same year, Penn State $64.6 million, Washington $52.9 million, Illinois $50.7 million and Michigan $50.4 million. Oregon, another West Coast arrival, still raised $33.2 million. Maryland and Rutgers sat behind UCLA at $11.3 million and $8.1 million. UCLA’s own donor line had already been sliding, from $18.5 million in 2022 to $15.6 million, then $13.9 million, then $13.5 million.

Jarmond had trouble with that base well before Monday. Some donors had questioned his leadership in public. Football attendance set record lows in multiple seasons, and the program won one bowl, the LA Bowl, during his tenure. Chip Kelly left for the Ohio State offensive coordinator job. DeShaun Foster went 5-10, then 0-3 in 2025, and was fired. The conference move bought time on the media line. It did not rebuild the parts of the budget that depend on people showing up and writing checks.

What the Faculty Demanded Before the Firing

In June, Academic Senate chair Megan McEvoy told Frenk that athletics made up about 30 to 40 percent of the campus structural deficit and posted the worst deficit of any college athletics program in the country. The Senate asked for a plan by July 31 to cut the central subsidy, and Frenk fired Jarmond on August 31 without publishing that plan.

McEvoy’s June 10 letter, sent with the Council on Planning and Budget’s June 3 memo, is the paper trail for who pushed this. The Academic Senate letters on the deficit treat the subsidy as a tax on teaching and research, not a sports-page complaint. Members voted unanimously to send the follow-up. They compared the accumulated athletics hole, which they pegged in the $250 million to $300 million range, to federal grant funds frozen in 2025, an event campus had treated as an existential threat.

The money that campus administration is funneling into Athletics could instead be used to directly support the academic mission. It is time for Athletics to return to playing by the same rules as the rest of campus.

Megan McEvoy, chair, UCLA Academic Senate, June 10, 2026 letter

Richard Desjardins, chair of the Council on Planning and Budget, wrote that the unit’s structural imbalance had reached about $80 million a year and that Jarmond’s June 1 session with the council sounded resigned to living with it. The administration’s talk of considering the issue further in the coming year, he wrote, was “wholly inadequate.” Athletics expenses had grown about 25 percent a year since 2018, far faster than revenue, and no athletics budget conference had been held that year.

WHAT THE SENATE ASKED FOR BY JULY 31

• A spending plan: Concrete steps to cut or end athletics spending from the central budget.
• Loan payoff: A plan for athletics to repay money it had drawn from campus.
• Two donor tallies: Separate figures for gifts to athletics and gifts to the rest of campus that athletics can claim to have helped produce.
• Big Ten math: A campus-wide accounting of how joining the league changed revenue and costs beyond the athletic department.

Faculty did note one cash move they liked: Frenk’s announcement that $50 million of Under Armour settlement money would go against the accumulated past deficit. They still wanted operating spending brought in line. Desjardins warned that even with that settlement endowment and a $250 million taxable bond, the annual shortfall could not be closed by hoping revenue would catch up. NIL and revenue sharing, the council said, did not explain years of red ink that started before those rules.

Frenk’s answer in August was not a published cut list. It was an unpaid CEO whose job is to grow the top line and, in the chancellor’s phrasing, protect the breadth of the program. That is a different bet from the one the Senate wrote down in June.

Chesney’s First Game Lands Without Jarmond

Bob Chesney’s UCLA debut is Saturday at California, at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley. Jarmond named Chesney the Bruins head coach on December 6, 2025, calling him a builder of winners and the man to take football back to national prominence. Chesney is the 20th head coach in UCLA football history and the first sitting head coach the school has hired since Pepper Rodgers in 1971. He came from James Madison with a 132-51 career record over 16 seasons as a head coach, eight conference titles, and a 21-5 mark in two years with the Dukes.

Frenk had praised that hire at the time and credited Jarmond for leading the search. The committee included Casey Wasserman, Bob Myers, Washington Commanders general manager Adam Peters, former Bruin Eric Kendricks and executive senior associate athletics director Erin Adkins. Chesney said then that UCLA had every ingredient needed to win at a high level and that leadership, alumni and the fan base were ready.

On Tuesday, after practice, Chesney called the firing a chance and a loss at the same time. “Every adversity presents a seed of opportunity and I think that’s where we sit here today,” he said. He also called Jarmond “an unbelievable friend.” The coach now reports to a volunteer CEO who was not in the room when that contract was struck, three days before kickoff, with a roster and staff Chesney has been assembling since December.

Football is the sport that most needs the donor and ticket lines Harris is supposed to lift, and it is the sport whose travel costs jumped when the Bruins joined a Midwest-heavy league. It is also the sport whose last two head-coaching cycles burned time and buyouts. Chesney is the piece Jarmond got right at the end. He will open the season without him.

Make Athletics Pay for Itself

Harris inherits tools Jarmond already built. UCLA moved its apparel deal to Nike and Jordan Brand, signed an 11-year multimedia partnership with JMI Sports, and reworked Champion of Westwood, the school’s NIL collective, into separate funds for men’s basketball, women’s basketball and Olympic sports, and football. Angelo Mazzone III pledged $10 million in April to endow the head football coach’s chair. Those are starting points, not a balanced budget.

WHAT FRENK TOLD HARRIS TO BUILD

• Partnerships: New business deals that turn UCLA sports into a brand a Lakers executive would recognize, using Harris’s Los Angeles and global contacts.
• Licensing and ventures: Revenue that does not depend on another bump in conference media cash, after that bump already landed.
• A full sports menu: Frenk’s letter says the model must protect the breadth of the program, which means the wager is growth, not dropping teams.
• Athlete support: Keep coaches and athletes funded well enough to compete while the department stops leaning on the chancellor’s office.

An unpaid NBA rainmaker is a strange answer to a college department that could not get donors to the league median, and that is the point of the hire. Harris already had the run of the books as a volunteer auditor. Frenk then gave him the CEO title and asked him to sell his way out of a hole faculty wanted closed with cuts. The Bruins kick off Saturday in Berkeley. Harris starts with no salary, a $241.1 million tab behind him, and a Senate file that still asks when campus will stop paying the difference.