UC Regents officially approves Calimony from UCLA to Cal, $30 million over 3 years

The California Golden Bears will get a critical $10 million per year influx through 2027.

Credit: Rex Volcano

The UC Regents made Calimony basically official last Tuesday when the Special Committee of Athletics recommended the payments to UCLA through 2027. The vote still had to go to the full board for approval, and the vote was 15-1-1 in favor last week that officially set it in stone.

This vote officially ensures that UCLA will make $10 million annual payments to Cal, likely siphoned off from their Big Ten media rights revenue. The $10 million calculation was proposed by the UC Regents as the upper limit to offset the difference between what a proposed Pac-12 deal would’ve netted vs what UCLA ended up making from the Big Ten deal. The UC President approved that upper limit and the Regents signed off on three years, with an opportunity to revisit at the conclusion.

This $10 milion was a crucial component of Cal accepting a reduced ACC deal to ensure they retained Power 5 status in the post Pac-12 world. Cal should receive $7 to $10 million of the ACC media rights revenue, hopefully another $10 million or so of playoff revenue from the auto-bid, and another $1 million from SMU for foregoing revenue for seven years.

That amounts to $28 to $31 million or so at least for the Bears. Respectable. Survivable.

Cal will still be seeing reduced revenue compared to what they were expecting with a new Pac-12 deal, which will likely require some tough decisions ahead for the athletic department, but Calimony will help avoid a total overhaul.

This number will be re-evaluated in 2027, based on the differences between Cal and UCLA media rights revenue. So it’s likely that the Calimony could continue past that date if Cal does not find a suitable home for itself.

One thought is that this could incentivize UCLA to fight even harder for a Big Ten invite. The biggest reason Calimony payments are happening from UCLA is because Cal did not get a Big Ten invite at the same time, which would’ve negated any sort of calculation in media rights differences. So now there are actual incentives for this.

And the result would be a win-win. UCLA would no longer pay Calimony and get $10 million per annum back for a full Big Ten revenue share. Cal, even if they get in at a reduced revenue share, would have more than enough revenue coverage.

However, for Cal to get a Big Ten invite, they have to prove themselves an attractive team football-wise. Calimony is the last non-performance concession the Bears can probably extract. They need results on the field, and they need to start proving they are more than a neat little survival story. The wins must come for Cal to survive beyond the next few years.