Cal donors in revolt: The choice between Ron Rivera and Jim Knowlton is obvious

UC Berkeley has dithered in dealing with their Jim Knowlton problem, and the pressure is building.

Some background to begin, because this latest round of news all begins because of Cal’s Football’s confusing new leadership structure.

Head football coach Justin Wilcox reports to Jim Knowlton. Football general manager Ron Rivera reports to Chancellor Rich Lyons. Justin Wilcox’s job is to win football games. Ron Rivera’s job is, per Cal, to “focus on revenue generation and fund raising.”

You can understand why there might be confusion. The term “General Manager” is a well known title in the world of sports, where it is generally defined as a position in charge of roster and personnel management of a sporting franchise. At the professional level, that means making draft picks, attempting to sign players in free agency, hiring and firing coaches (and scouts, and support staff, etc) and generally running the business side of a team.

At the college level, one would assume a general manager would be responsible for NIL, transfer portal management, and general recruiting support in addition to “revenue generation and fund raising,” which I would interpret as a nice way of saying “coordinating with Cal’s NIL donor collective.” Stanford sees the role as basically similar to the professional sports world, after Andrew Luck exercised his authority to fire Troy Taylor.

So exactly how much authority does Ron Rivera have in his new role? It’s that exact question that has led to controversy, with Cal donors speaking out regarding Cal’s football organization for Cal athletics.

It all started with an editorial from Bear Insider, with a rather innocuous headline but more pointed language in the article. The thrust of the article? Ron Rivera should unequivocally be put in charge of Cal’s football program as a general manager:

Each of you needs to come to your own conclusions about the state of Athletic Department and the potential impact of Ron Rivera’s appointment. For now, we will be refraining from donating to the program and further will not encourage any of you to do so. Instead, regardless of your feelings, we strongly suggest you reach out to Chancellor Lyons and share how you feel about the state of Cal Athletics, Jim Knowlton as your Athletic Director and how you believe he can best support Ron Rivera as the Cal Football General Manager.

And why would Cal fans want Cal football under the direction of Ron Rivera, and not under the direction of Jim Knowlton? Because Jim Knowlton is uniquely bad at his job:

Since Knowlton has arrived, Cal’s performance in its athletic endeavors have hit an all-time low, donor interest outside of the entirely donor inspired and led Caliber funds and the Cal Legends Collective have been anemic. What has pervaded the athletic department under Knowlton’s leadership is a culture of “No”. Knowlton never understood or realized the importance of Football to the success and outright survival of the school’s other sports and instead knowingly and intentionally misled donors who believe they were giving to Cal Football only to disperse those funds to other sports. The day-to-day operations of sports inside Cal are ones that require coaches to work around the administration or anguish in stifled frustration at the misaligned priorities and complete lack of imagination and creativity. To be clear, there’s zero chance that Cal would be in the ACC right now and be anywhere close to being competitive in Football and Basketball without donors directly intervening and forcing Jim Knowlton to invest their money in the Bears football program.

This statement got picked up by SFGate, then by CBS Sports, then NBC Sports, because it’s the off-season and nobody wants to ignore a juicy “Donor revolt!” story. And if somebody who doesn’t pay much attention to Cal dismissed this as a donor power play, I would understand.

But all of us DO pay lots of attention to Cal sports, and so we’re already pretty familiar with the failures of Cal’s athletic department, particularly at the AD position. Speaking only for myself, I certainly agree with the arguments and conclusions made by the Bear Insider editorial, and would like to add on. To be clear, I agree that Ron Rivera, with his background of more than a decade as an NFL head coach which included time acting as de facto GM, is imminently more qualified than anybody else to run Cal football.

But I also think we need to talk about the ongoing elephant in the athletic department. Jim Knowlton’s continued employment at Cal is a slow moving scandal. And there are MANY reasons why his performance as athletic director has left many (most?) Cal fans asking for change. A brief list:

Mismanagement of athlete abuse

In May of 2022, reporting revealed allegations of serious professional misconduct committed by now-former Cal women’s swim coach Teri McKeever. In January of 2023, Cal completed their investigation into McKeever’s conduct and fired her. That same investigation confirmed that senior Cal Athletics administrators, including Jim Knowlton, had been informed of the alleged misconduct, and did nothing.

This is your reminder that, nearly THREE YEARS after the initial report of misconduct, and more than two years after reporting that Cal had launched an investigation into Knowlton’s conduct, Jim Knowlton is still employed as Cal’s athletic director.

To my knowledge, there has been no comment or communication from Cal regarding the outcome of this investigation nor how it would impact Knowlton’s status as athletic director. Based on the utter lack of information, one could reasonably surmise that Cal is hoping that this will all just blow over and be ignored by the wider campus community.

Destruction of the Cal MBB program

Hiring Mark Fox was a move that was clearly ill-advised at the time and only looked worse with each passing year. Giving Mark Fox a COVID year extension that added to the buy-out was flabbergasting. Letting him stay in charge for four full seasons when it was clear his tenure was going to fail after two was no better.

The jury is still out on whether or not Mark Madsen is capable of pulling Cal out of the Marianas-Trench-level-depths with which Mike Williams and Jim Knowlton sank Cal men’s basketball, but the damage has led to a lost decade for one of Cal’s two revenue sports.

General on-field performance across the athletic department

In the most high profile sports, Jim Knowlton has not made an obviously successful hire in his tenure. But perhaps more generally, Cal’s across-the-board struggles in the more high-profile sports I think demonstrates the failure of Jim Knowlton to provide his coaches with the support and funding necessary to succeed. This is obviously tied into the failure across multiple athletic department regimes to position Cal for the realities of conference realignment. That, to be fair, is a failure that is not solely the responsibility of Jim Knowlton, but neither was he a solution to the problem that has led to Cal sacrificing tens of millions of dollars annually after accepting junior partner status in the ACC.

Failure to unite and activate donors

Much of what I’ve written above is common knowledge, and in fact something we’ve covered on this website in the past. When I previously wrote out Jim Knowlton’s various failures, I did offer the following in his apparent favor:

In the interest of fairness, it’s my understanding that Knowlton has been successful in terms of donor outreach and fundraising, and that a lot has been accomplished in terms of endowing various Olympic sports. He’s also generally done a good job providing the football team with better resources.

To the extent that my understanding was accurate at the time, it appears it is no longer true. You can see the evidence in specific failures, like Cal’s inability to make progress towards a dedicated practice facility that continues to hamstring basketball recruiting, and you can see the evidence in the fact that a major chunk of Cal’s donors are now in open revolt. Is that open revolt in favor of Ron Rivera? Absolutely. But if Jim Knowlton had been performing his role successfully over his tenure I don’t think Cal fans would be all that fussed about the exact structure of the org chart.

So why is Jim Knowlton still employed?

While I have no doubt that Cal might be willing to look the other way over a scandal to retain a high performing employee in a key position, job performance cannot reasonably explain Knowlton’s retention. As discussed above, Knowlton has overseen the continued decline of Cal athletics since being hired from Air Force in 2018, culminating in Cal’s humiliating forced decision to join the Atlantic Coast Conference under de facto junior membership revenue shares. Knowlton’s tenure has been marked by massive revenue sport struggles, facility upgrade challenges, revenue shortfalls, and scandal.

Of course, that didn’t stop prior chancellor Carol Christ and the UC Regents from offering Jim Knowlton an incredibly ill-advised eight year contract extension in 2021, a decision that Cal is still paying for, literally and figuratively.

So what’s the real explanation? Options include:

1. Campus leadership believe that Jim Knowlton is an effective athletic director who deserves to remain in his position.

2. Campus leadership would like to dismiss Jim Knowlton, but Cal athletics cannot afford the approximately 4 million dollar buy-out still left on his contract extension

3. Campus leadership would like to dismiss Jim Knowlton for cause for his handling of the McKeever situation, but are prevented from doing so because this would create legal liability for the campus either by bolstering McKeever’s wrongful termination suit, or by inviting a lawsuit from Knowlton himself.

None of these options (2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive) are particularly appealing. The first option would indicate that current campus leadership still does not understand the series of failures that led to the situation where a 19 year old athlete with two midterms next week has to fly to North Carolina on a Wednesday night, all while the athletic department still has to take an eight figure revenue haircut.

The second and third options seem more plausible – that Cal is financially hamstrung such that they struggle to spend themselves out of the mistakes of the past, and/or are financially hamstrung such that they are unwilling to take on legal risk that could be costly pending future legal decisions. The fact that the UC Regents themselves are subject to a lawsuit from former Cal swimmers is probably important. It’s hard not to wonder if Cal is retaining Knowlton solely because if they fire him for cause, it implies that they knew he screwed up, thus implicating the UC Regents.

To state the obvious, I am not a lawyer. I don’t know what kind of legal liability Cal opens itself up to if they fire Knowlton, either for cause or just by paying his buyout so that he can go away.

But it’s also increasingly clear that there is a public relations/donor relations liability associated with retaining him. I suspect that with each passing day, the cost of keeping him grows higher, while the cost of his buy-out slowly goes down.

I also know what the right thing to do is. It was also the right thing to do back in 2022, when it was clear that he failed in the most basic duties given to him as a supposed steward of Cal students. The minute he failed to take action in response to serious allegations of student abuse was the same minute he should have been relieved of his duties.

That was the best time to fire him. The next best time? Now.