One year ago, nearly one dozen of UCLA's largest athletic donors approached a Los Angeles Times reporter to say they had lost faith in their athletic director. What almost nobody outside the school noticed was that they had already stopped writing checks. UCLA raised $18.5 million in donor contributions in fiscal 2022.
Donations worsened for three straight years, even though a move from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten in 2024 was supposed to fill the Bruins' treasure chest. By the time UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk fired athletic director Martin Jarmond on Monday, five days before Bob Chesney's first game as head coach of the football program, UCLA ranked 14th out of 16 public Big Ten schools in donations. The league median was $34.1 million in 2025, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database.
Washington, which joined the conference a year after UCLA and plays in the same time zone, raised $52.9 million. Frenk's letter to UCLA supporters late Monday did not mention donors, but it did outline a major deficit within the athletics department. "UCLA Athletics currently carries a significant financial deficit, and its current path is not sustainable," he wrote in a letter to UCLA supporters.
He said the future goal is a model that "supports itself through the revenue it generates." The problem is that UCLA's athletics department doesn't support itself, according to financial records filed with the NCAA over the years. Donations are the clearest measure of whether the people closest to a program believe in it. UCLA's donor base was declining before the move to the Big Ten and has continued since it arrived in the richest conference in college sports.
Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, from NCAA financial reports Set against the Big Ten conference, which UCLA joined in 2024, fiscal 2025 looks like this: Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database The complaints the donors aired publicly a year ago were specific. UCLA was slow to embrace the NIL market, and Jarmond kept football coach Chip Kelly in charge for too long. Perhaps the impetus for the donors' decision to go public with their grievances was the department's accidental leak in 2023 of a spreadsheet containing donors' giving histories, addresses and phone numbers, including Hall of Famer Troy Aikman, in an email.
The athletics department never apologized for the gaffe. "What's happening now feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion," one booster told the Los Angeles Times in October 2025. "What we're seeing isn't just a rough patch.
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