Dykes firing? Bears are bad box office
Cal football coach Sonny Dykes wasn’t fired simply because of concerns over his loyalty to the school — the big concern was that the team’s mediocre performance has led to a dramatic slump in season ticket sales at a time when the university’s entire athletic department is facing cuts.
Season ticket renewals for Cal’s 2017 season have dropped more than 30 percent from the same time last year, threatening a $2 million financial punch unless something changes.
“We believe that a coaching
change will reinvigorate Cal football, stimulate lagging ticket sales and renewals and energize our alumni, donor and fan base,” UC Berkeley Athletic Director Mike Williams said in an email to donors Sunday night.
Cal football is the main funding source for the school’s entire sports program. Counting tickets and TV revenue, the $43 million that football raises every year accounts for nearly half the $90 million in total revenue generated by all of Cal sports. Football’s $9.1 million profit underwrites Cal’s 29 other sports programs.
To be fair, football’s financial woes go back to before Dykes was hired four years ago. The seismic retrofit of Memorial Stadium, for example, has saddled the program with an $18 million annual debt.
But there are also bigger politics at play here.
Overall, UC Berkeley is facing a $110 million deficit, which means cuts in areas far beyond sports.
Chancellor Nicholas Dirks has formed a task force to help provide cover for decisions that are sure to prove unpopular. Battle lines are already being drawn between alumni fans hoping to avoid deep cuts in sports and faculty members looking to protect academic programs.
The 12-member Committee on Interscholastic Sports — which is being co-chaired by Academic Senate leader Robert Powell, a political science professor, and UC Berkeley Foundation Trustee Robert O’Donnell — was initially expected to deliver its recommended sports cuts to the chancellor this month. Now, that’s been put off until spring.
In 2010, UC Berkeley announced plans to eliminate the baseball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, rugby and lacrosse teams, but backed off after supporters raised enough money to save them.
With an annual sports deficit now about $21 million, some school officials question whether that will be possible this time. Cal is trying to operate with 30 sports, more than twice the NCAA minimum of 14, while meeting Title IX regulations requiring parity for women’s athletics.
UC Berkeley officials caution that the potential hit list is a “moving target.” But one source following the process says among the programs most in jeopardy are men’s soccer, rugby, gymnastics, baseball and crew.
“At this point, not a single decision has been made,” Cal spokesman Dan Mogulof told us.
With the cuts looming, it’s a bit ironic that Cal extended Dykes’ contract by two years after the 2015 season — ensuring that he will be paid 70 percent of his nearly $3 million-ayear salary through 2019. That is, unless he’s hired as a coach at another school, in which case Cal will be on the hook only for the difference in pay.
When officials extended Dykes’ deal, the football program appeared to be on an upward swing, with improving academic scores for players and the team having just landed in a money-making bowl game.
But the Golden Bears’ 5-7 record this past season, coupled with reports that Dykes was recently in the hunt for the Baylor coaching job, suggested he wasn’t really the answer for Cal football.
As one athletic department insider who wasn’t authorized to speak for the record told us: “When there are rumors every year that your football coach is looking for a different job, at some point you decide that’s not what you want.” Nice try: No one would cast San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee as Luke Skywalker, but he did put up one heck of a fight to try to get George Lucas to build his museum on Treasure Island.
In the months following the Presidio Trust’s rejection of Lucas’ proposal for Crissy Field in 2014, Lee stayed in regular contact with the “Star Wars” creator about finding a place for his museum of narrative arts.
“I felt as bad as he did,” Lee recalled Monday as he posed with boosters on Treasure Island to give one last PR push before Tuesday’s vote by the Lucas museum board of directors — which, in the end, opted for Los Angeles.
Earlier, Lee was on the phone with Lucas — telling him he was pushing for ferries that would take museumgoers to the island to run on biofuel, which would be good for the environment and speed up the approval process for the service.
Lee also brought in the mayors of Oakland and Berkeley to help sell the Treasure Island plan as a boon for kids throughout the Bay Area.
And as an added touch, Lee also enlisted the help of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Jerry Brown.
Lucas promised to call the mayor once the decision was made, but by Tuesday morning, the mayor started feeling that the force was not going to be with him.
“You could feel it in the silence,” said one staffer close to the museum effort.
And indeed, the call came around 1 p.m., with Lucas telling Lee that although San Francisco put forth a solid proposal, he was going to build his museum in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park — where it will join several other museums in the heart of a low-income community in need of a lift. What’s more, the area is easy to get to by car.
So instead of an iconic landmark on the bay, Lucas has opted for a parking lot in L.A. San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or email matierandross@ sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @matierandross