Didn't get the audio from it until this morning, here it all is:
Opening Thoughts
I feel for our student athletes, obviously this has been a challenging month, a few months as we’ve tried to figure out what we can do, how we can support our student athletes, how can we support sports during COVID, and I just think we came to the point where we no longer felt comfortable with the spread of the virus, it’s still not controlled and some of the challenges we’ve heard with the complications of COVID, it just didn’t make sense for us to put our student athletes in a position where they were competing against each other. It was a tough decision, and I’m proud of our chancellors, presidents and our commissioner, they led us through pros and cons as we consulted with medical experts, but at the end of the day we just didn’t feel, at this point in time, that moving to competitions was the right thing to do.
We’re going to support our student athletes, we’ll work really hard to make sure we get them another year of eligibility and we’ve guaranteed their scholarships. Playing competitions for the rest of the year will not be in the cards for our student athletes.
Early thoughts on financial impact, on maintaining sports in the midst of losing revenue
I think the chancellor and I have been in alignment since I’ve arrived, and that is that cutting sports would be an absolute last resort. I think that we don’t know what the spring will hold, if we lose football, we’ve already got a plan in place if we are short roughly $50 million in revenue, and we have a plan that will allow us to continue to meet our budget numbers. I’m not thinking about cutting sports, it’s not one of the branches we’re looking at, and we’ll be able to support our 850 student-athletes in 30 sports.
You followed the Big 10 in postponing the season, was that in lockstep with them and thoughts on other conferences that haven’t postponed
Well, one of the great things that has happened during this pandemic is that everyone has become, not more collegiate, because that’s not the right term, but more collaborative. Larry and all of the Power 5 commissioners meet every day, and if it’s not every day, it’s every other day, and they have been in lockstep in sharing information, sharing medical information, talking about strategies and plans. We meet with the Pac-12, with all the ADs, my morning starts three days a week with all the ADs of the Pac-12 and the Pac-12 leadership, we’ve done a lot of talking.
I think the Big-10 and the Pac-12, we’re pretty much in alignment, and I think that it happening with an hour difference was just a function of chancellors and presidents wanting to talk and having a discussion before making a decision. The other three are thinking about this and really wondering ‘can they protect their student athletes and create a safe environment.’ I’m not sure what they’ll do, but all of them were in these meetings with Larry and Bob Bowlsby just talking about the challenges of having a season this year.
You mentioned the revenue loss, is 50 million the loss you expect, and with the loan program that has been proposed for Pac-12 schools, is that viable for you?
It’s hard to say (what the revenue loss looks like), if we play football in the spring, our numbers are certainly different than if we don’t have football throughout the year. I’d say $50 million is probably the neighborhood in which we’re starting, but again, so much can happen, so much can change if football actually takes place with or without fans.
As far as the Pac-12 loan program, we’re going to evaluate it, we’re going to evaluate multiple options in order to meet our budget this year, that’ll certainly be one of the possibilities that we’ll evaluate.
What has the reaction been from coaches and athletes to the postponement?
The first gut reaction of everybody is disappointment, we had a coaches call right when the news was being announced, I wanted to be able to look them in the eye and share with them, and as you can imagine, there’s been so much talk in the press all weekend about the eventuality of this, and I don’t think it came as a huge surprise, but I think the finality of it was striking.
The good news about it is that we’d already been doing a lot of planning in case this happened, and we immediately started talking about our plans for the fall, winter, and then spring and what we’re going to be able to do for all of our student athletes as we move forward.
Can you envision what spring football would look like with regard to campus, staffing, with all of them going on at the same time, and also, what do the health risks of trying to play two football seasons in a calendar year look like?
The first part of the discussion was, probably three months ago, as a course of action our staff developed a plan of what it would look like in the spring if all 30 sports were happening at once, and what was amazing was we came up with a plan of how we could do it, how we could support it. It would be exhausting, there’s no doubt it would be exhausting. I think it’s possible, what we would end up doing is have football start as soon as we could in the new year, and of course that’s based on everything we hear from medical experts, if we’ve controlled the virus, and the more we know about some of the cardiac implications. So sooner rather than later, because a big concern is trying to do two football seasons in one year, it’s certainly a big concern for administrators, a big concern for players as well.
We’re not sure what the NCAA is going to do with our fall sports, if they say there won’t be any NCAA championships in the spring, that reduces the complexity if all of our fall sports know that the next time they’re going to be competing is next fall. We’re watching that closely, over the next couple of weeks the NCAA has multiple meetings where some of those decisions will be made.
I know you said you have no plans to drop sports, but Stanford did drop 11 sports. Do you think that shrinking of NCAA sports is inevitable around the country?
One of the things about this pandemic is that it’s a short-term problem. We were absolutely humming along with a budget I was really proud of, with revenue, development, and fundraising, we were doing an absolutely wonderful job. Our football team has the Axe now after a decade, we were feeling really good, we won a bowl game and our basketball teams are both on the rise. I really do believe that 12 to 18 months from now we’re going to be back in that spot, maybe sooner.
So you hate to make long-term decisions for short term, relatively short-term problems. It takes three to four years to see benefits (from cutting sports), because you’ve got to pay out scholarships and pay coaches, and I just feel like, 30 sports at Cal, the number one public school in the country, 850 student athletes, there are so many phenomenal opportunities for young men and women, I would hate to reduce those opportunities if I don’t have to.
With the postponement, what exactly are your fall sports athletes allowed to do right now with regards to training and everything?
Well that’s interesting, we’ve got a coaches meeting tomorrow, today I gave them the news and said ‘here are the five or six things I want you to think about,’ so tomorrow we’ll talk about it. But really if the fall sports aren’t going to play again until next fall, they’re probably not going to be spending as much time on campus. So I would imagine we’ll see everything from kids taking a semester off. There will be a lot of different decisions that are made, and right now I suspect all our coaches are coming up with questions for the AD, so we’ll be managing those questions tomorrow.
What about layoffs/furloughs?
We’ve developed a lot of different models to get through a potential $50 million dollar shortfall, there will certainly be some personnel actions we will have to take, we don’t know how severe they will have to be, we’ve modeled multiple ways that we can reduce our expenses and there will certainly be some human resource decisions that we will make.
(Later clarification on this to mean furloughs and salary cuts instead of layoffs)
One thing from the Pac-12 Call was the possibility of transfers to schools playing this fall, what’s your thought on that?
It’s a good question, I think for the most part at our school, where kids are getting a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, they want to stay if we can sort out eligibility, their scholarship, the scholarship limit, and we’ve already sat down as a league and sorted out one of the pieces of legislation that would have to be enacted, one that wouldn’t require much thought because we already did it for the spring sports. We were able to work through all of the challenges for all of the seniors who had lost eligibility, and we were able to come up with a way that gave them another year of eligibility, which allowed us to exceed scholarship limits for one year, and that’s what we’re going to try to do with the NCAA once again for our fall sports.
If there’s no spring football and there’s a kid who wants to take the next step and may want to leave, are you concerned about that?
I would say I’m concerned about that, along with 450 other things right now, it’s something that coach Wilcox and I have already talked about.
Opening Thoughts
I feel for our student athletes, obviously this has been a challenging month, a few months as we’ve tried to figure out what we can do, how we can support our student athletes, how can we support sports during COVID, and I just think we came to the point where we no longer felt comfortable with the spread of the virus, it’s still not controlled and some of the challenges we’ve heard with the complications of COVID, it just didn’t make sense for us to put our student athletes in a position where they were competing against each other. It was a tough decision, and I’m proud of our chancellors, presidents and our commissioner, they led us through pros and cons as we consulted with medical experts, but at the end of the day we just didn’t feel, at this point in time, that moving to competitions was the right thing to do.
We’re going to support our student athletes, we’ll work really hard to make sure we get them another year of eligibility and we’ve guaranteed their scholarships. Playing competitions for the rest of the year will not be in the cards for our student athletes.
Early thoughts on financial impact, on maintaining sports in the midst of losing revenue
I think the chancellor and I have been in alignment since I’ve arrived, and that is that cutting sports would be an absolute last resort. I think that we don’t know what the spring will hold, if we lose football, we’ve already got a plan in place if we are short roughly $50 million in revenue, and we have a plan that will allow us to continue to meet our budget numbers. I’m not thinking about cutting sports, it’s not one of the branches we’re looking at, and we’ll be able to support our 850 student-athletes in 30 sports.
You followed the Big 10 in postponing the season, was that in lockstep with them and thoughts on other conferences that haven’t postponed
Well, one of the great things that has happened during this pandemic is that everyone has become, not more collegiate, because that’s not the right term, but more collaborative. Larry and all of the Power 5 commissioners meet every day, and if it’s not every day, it’s every other day, and they have been in lockstep in sharing information, sharing medical information, talking about strategies and plans. We meet with the Pac-12, with all the ADs, my morning starts three days a week with all the ADs of the Pac-12 and the Pac-12 leadership, we’ve done a lot of talking.
I think the Big-10 and the Pac-12, we’re pretty much in alignment, and I think that it happening with an hour difference was just a function of chancellors and presidents wanting to talk and having a discussion before making a decision. The other three are thinking about this and really wondering ‘can they protect their student athletes and create a safe environment.’ I’m not sure what they’ll do, but all of them were in these meetings with Larry and Bob Bowlsby just talking about the challenges of having a season this year.
You mentioned the revenue loss, is 50 million the loss you expect, and with the loan program that has been proposed for Pac-12 schools, is that viable for you?
It’s hard to say (what the revenue loss looks like), if we play football in the spring, our numbers are certainly different than if we don’t have football throughout the year. I’d say $50 million is probably the neighborhood in which we’re starting, but again, so much can happen, so much can change if football actually takes place with or without fans.
As far as the Pac-12 loan program, we’re going to evaluate it, we’re going to evaluate multiple options in order to meet our budget this year, that’ll certainly be one of the possibilities that we’ll evaluate.
What has the reaction been from coaches and athletes to the postponement?
The first gut reaction of everybody is disappointment, we had a coaches call right when the news was being announced, I wanted to be able to look them in the eye and share with them, and as you can imagine, there’s been so much talk in the press all weekend about the eventuality of this, and I don’t think it came as a huge surprise, but I think the finality of it was striking.
The good news about it is that we’d already been doing a lot of planning in case this happened, and we immediately started talking about our plans for the fall, winter, and then spring and what we’re going to be able to do for all of our student athletes as we move forward.
Can you envision what spring football would look like with regard to campus, staffing, with all of them going on at the same time, and also, what do the health risks of trying to play two football seasons in a calendar year look like?
The first part of the discussion was, probably three months ago, as a course of action our staff developed a plan of what it would look like in the spring if all 30 sports were happening at once, and what was amazing was we came up with a plan of how we could do it, how we could support it. It would be exhausting, there’s no doubt it would be exhausting. I think it’s possible, what we would end up doing is have football start as soon as we could in the new year, and of course that’s based on everything we hear from medical experts, if we’ve controlled the virus, and the more we know about some of the cardiac implications. So sooner rather than later, because a big concern is trying to do two football seasons in one year, it’s certainly a big concern for administrators, a big concern for players as well.
We’re not sure what the NCAA is going to do with our fall sports, if they say there won’t be any NCAA championships in the spring, that reduces the complexity if all of our fall sports know that the next time they’re going to be competing is next fall. We’re watching that closely, over the next couple of weeks the NCAA has multiple meetings where some of those decisions will be made.
I know you said you have no plans to drop sports, but Stanford did drop 11 sports. Do you think that shrinking of NCAA sports is inevitable around the country?
One of the things about this pandemic is that it’s a short-term problem. We were absolutely humming along with a budget I was really proud of, with revenue, development, and fundraising, we were doing an absolutely wonderful job. Our football team has the Axe now after a decade, we were feeling really good, we won a bowl game and our basketball teams are both on the rise. I really do believe that 12 to 18 months from now we’re going to be back in that spot, maybe sooner.
So you hate to make long-term decisions for short term, relatively short-term problems. It takes three to four years to see benefits (from cutting sports), because you’ve got to pay out scholarships and pay coaches, and I just feel like, 30 sports at Cal, the number one public school in the country, 850 student athletes, there are so many phenomenal opportunities for young men and women, I would hate to reduce those opportunities if I don’t have to.
With the postponement, what exactly are your fall sports athletes allowed to do right now with regards to training and everything?
Well that’s interesting, we’ve got a coaches meeting tomorrow, today I gave them the news and said ‘here are the five or six things I want you to think about,’ so tomorrow we’ll talk about it. But really if the fall sports aren’t going to play again until next fall, they’re probably not going to be spending as much time on campus. So I would imagine we’ll see everything from kids taking a semester off. There will be a lot of different decisions that are made, and right now I suspect all our coaches are coming up with questions for the AD, so we’ll be managing those questions tomorrow.
What about layoffs/furloughs?
We’ve developed a lot of different models to get through a potential $50 million dollar shortfall, there will certainly be some personnel actions we will have to take, we don’t know how severe they will have to be, we’ve modeled multiple ways that we can reduce our expenses and there will certainly be some human resource decisions that we will make.
(Later clarification on this to mean furloughs and salary cuts instead of layoffs)
One thing from the Pac-12 Call was the possibility of transfers to schools playing this fall, what’s your thought on that?
It’s a good question, I think for the most part at our school, where kids are getting a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, they want to stay if we can sort out eligibility, their scholarship, the scholarship limit, and we’ve already sat down as a league and sorted out one of the pieces of legislation that would have to be enacted, one that wouldn’t require much thought because we already did it for the spring sports. We were able to work through all of the challenges for all of the seniors who had lost eligibility, and we were able to come up with a way that gave them another year of eligibility, which allowed us to exceed scholarship limits for one year, and that’s what we’re going to try to do with the NCAA once again for our fall sports.
If there’s no spring football and there’s a kid who wants to take the next step and may want to leave, are you concerned about that?
I would say I’m concerned about that, along with 450 other things right now, it’s something that coach Wilcox and I have already talked about.
