UC Regents Approve UCLA's Annual $10 Million Subsidy to Cal But For Only 3 Years

The full board will finalize the decision on Thursday; Regents expected to revisit the topic in 2027.

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Cal Athletics will receive $10 million per year from UCLA as compensation for the Bruins’ departure to the Big Ten Conference, but the UC Board of Regents will require payments for just three years.

A Regents committee met Tuesday at UC Merced and was expected to award Cal with $10 million for each of the next six years. Instead, they cut the timetable in half, according to reporting by Jon Wilner of the Mercury News.

The annual payments are scheduled to begin in 2024-25, when UCLA joins the Big Ten and Cal enters the Atlantic Coast Conference. The subsidy will end in the summer of 2027, when the Regents will revisit the issue.

The duration of the payments apparently was shortened because of the fluid nature of college athletics, with no one entirely clear how things will appear by 2027, by which time major conference may have created a revenue-sharing arrangement with athletes.

The agenda for Thursday’s meeting of the full board of Regents includes an item titled, "Committee Reports Including Approvals of Recommendations from Committees.”

Tuesday’s committee discussion included Regent Keith Ellis offering “strong reservations because of the precedent it sets where we take from one campus and give to another.”

Regent Richard Sherman proposed that the payment timeframe be reduced to one year.

But Chair Richard Leib responded that the gap in revenue between the two athletic departments “has gotten a lot worse” since Dec. 2022, when the regents approved a contribution ranging from $2 million to $10 million.

Cal, which will enter the ACC in the fall along with Stanford and SMU, will receive just a 30-percent share of the ACC’s media rights payout from ESPN over the next seven years, which figures to be in the neighborhood of $8 million to $10 million per year.

By comparison, UCLA will receive a 100-percent share of Big Ten TV money, expected to around $65 million, on average, for the remaining six years of the league’s deals with Fox, CBS and NBC.