In Reply to: Re: So ... privatize UCLA football? posted by Deplorable on September 16, 2024 at 13:08:28
the Morgan Center, if you want to do this right. What really matters here is that the administrators at the chancellor's level or heck maybe above that need to be shown that
(a) success in lowly riff-raff sports like football (or anything other than rugby or rowing, you know, the ivy league stuff) would not undermine the academic credibility of the university, and
(b) this is the tough one: develop a model in which increased athletic revenues somehow benefit the entire university and not just the athletic program and select few athletes and administrators, which I assume is pretty damn near impossible to do because money has already poisoned the damn well at this point: the more money you allow into a system, the more corrupt, self-centered, backstabbing, eye-gouging the people in that system become. But there will be no success in major sports at UCLA unless there is a way for that success to benefit everyone, and the administrators buy into that concept.
Now, you might say, if you spin off the football program into a private, for profit entity, you won't have to benefit a bigger section of the university population, you can keep it relatively small and so more profitable, to which I say "f**k that!"
I'll be completely honest with you. I'd rather have the football program at UCLA shutter down for good than turn it into yet another revenue source and ego-gratification playground for a handful of billionaires whose entire mission seems to be the utter ernsh*ttification of every good thing in life they can get their grubby little hands on. You do not do that to my team.