Reaction: Cuts To Cal Athletics Department

The cuts weren’t “necessitated” by Title IX. Just shaped by it. The cuts are a result of finances. Which student athletes and coaches are losing their sports is being shaped by Title IX, as Chancellor Birgeneau stated today in his letter to the Cal community.

Great post, though. You’ve gotta feel for those kids and staff.

got out just in time – he just stepped down. Guess he saw the writing on the wall.

Sad that Tim McNeill won’t get a chance to be a Cal head coach.

…if the fact that the cuts were so severe means Cal is trying to take all the damage up front, rather than cut a sport or two and then have to come back next year and cut another one, and then another one the year after that – all while fighting a perception problem as Memorial gets rebuilt. Not fair, since the SAHPC and stadium updates have been in the works for years (and might be done by now if somebody had just gotten a ball bat and cleaned house), but I guarantee you’d hear all about how football was getting all the money at the expense of everyone else if varsity sports started bleeding out one-a-semester.

From my article from SB Nation Bay Area, this comment:

Absolute transparency for University of California Berkeley. UC Berkeley’s budget gap has grown to $150 million, & Chancellor Birgeneau is spending money that isn’t there on $3,000,000 consultants. (A world-class East Coast University is doing the same as UC Berkeley without consultants: $0 cost). His reasons range from the need for impartiality to requiring the consultants "thinking".
Does this mean that the Faculty & management of UC Berkeley – flagship campus of the greatest public system of higher education in the world – lack the thinking, integrity, impartiality, innovation to identify savings? Have they been fudging their research for years?
The consultants will, by the way, get their recommendations from faculty & staff interviews; yet $150 million of inefficiencies could be found internally if the Chancellor & Provost Breslauer did the WORK of their $500,000 jobs (This simple point is lost on Breslauer, Birgeneau).
The victims of this folly are Faculty, Students & taxpayers.
There is only one conclusion as to why inefficiencies are not volunteered by faculty & staff: Chancellor Birgeneau & Provost Breslauer have lost the credibility & trust of Cal Faculty & Staff. Even if the faculty agrees the consultants’ recommendations – disagreeing might put their jobs in jeopardy – the underlying problem of lost credibility & trust remains.

Its origins are in the Cal-Stanford baseball rivalry.

Why can’t USC use some of the money it pays to its players to pay for these sports?? Why is the world so unfair?

how many prominent Bay Area sportswriters graduated from Cal? Did guys like Ostler, Knapp, Inman go to Cal? Just wondering how Cal graduates in the media aren’t making a big deal out of this.

I get the sense from wandering around the internets that when Cal rugby wins a national championship next year lots of Cal people claiming to be rugby fans are going to say “WAAAAH? I thought we cut the rugby program?!?”

Xavier Nady reacts

“It’s sad,” Nady said. "I know the coaches and they took a lot of pride in what they did. It’s too bad it’s not generating any revenue.

“It’s just sad more than anything.”

Jack Clark reacts

“The current and historic values, standards and ethos of Cal rugby as a high-performance sport are superior to those of intercollegiate athletics as a whole,” he said. “Moreover, I can promise that this same Cal rugby culture will not be victim to administrative structure.”

Love that guy.

As someone who has attended Cal baseball games, a gymnastic meet (I went to a dual meet with both men and women), and even a women lacrosse game, it is quite disappointing to know that future Cal students (and alumni) won’t get the chance to do so after this year. More importantly, the budget deficit in both athletics and academic might not even be solved by this. I would be equally as sad if (and hopefully not when) Cal would have to cut academic departments.

As for Cal rugby (which I have attended 2 matches), I’m still a bit unclear on its impact (if any). Cal rugby appears to have a big enough donor base to not lose too much by losing the varsity status. If we’re going to blame anything on Title IX, it’s got to be for pushing rugby down to this varsity club status.

I’m hopeful that thing will get better rather than get worse.

Plus all schools including private ones depend on donations, but when even the upper class are watching their Ps and Qs less will be there to go around. You all know why college team have gatorade coolers on the sidelines don’t you, the school not only get the product free but they get Millions in dollars from sponsor. Cal baseball is a direct hit to wake up the over spenders, so now even your FB and BB coaches jobs are not safe. Those 2 are lucky that they have fresh deals, because if they were coming up on renewal it wouldn’t happen.

I’ve seen video of Sandy and Robert talking but I didn’t see any transcripts of questions being asked. I would be sure “So Baseball is NEVER EVER EVER coming back?” would have been a question. I’m nervous about people saying Evans Diamond would be replaced with something else. I’m hoping that Cal could pull an Oregon and bring baseball back in a decade or less.

I’m starting to become less delusional and am accepting that donations and protests won’t bring baseball out of death. I don’t think students are going to ironically wear red during Big Game week (to protest budget cuts like last year) in droves to keep baseball and rugby.

At least I can say I’ve been to all 4 sports being cut + rugby.

              TO CAL BASEBALL
                  (RIP 9-28-10)
The grass in the outfield has faded to brown.
    The crack of the bat’s just a memory faded.
The seats in the bleachers are all taken down.
    The voices of summer are silenced and jaded.
No “Put me in Coach cause I’m ready to play.”
    No Ernie at short shouting “Time to play two.”
Cause Joltin’ Joe’s left us. Yes, Joe’s gone away,
    And there’s no joy in Bearville for the old Gold and Blue.
To Wolfman, Milano, Jensen and Chapman,
   To Messersmith, Nady and Kent.
Hang up your uniform; turn in your cap man.
   Cause all of your money’s been spent.
There’s crying in baseball. The facts are the facts:
   America’s game is thrown under the bus,
And a storied tradition of “Give ’em the axe”,
   Now ends with the axe being given to us.