Martin Jarmond’s Dismissal Was a Long Time Coming

The former UCLA AD could not adapt to the changing college landscape, and UCLA could not afford to keep him around.

Martin Jarmond (Photo credit: @PeteThamel)

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Among the top six most-viewed articles we have written here are these two:

Deshaun Foster Does Not Deserve What is About to Happen to Him

O Martin Where Art Thou?

Both share a similar theme: an athletic director in over his head and woefully unprepared to meet the moment. Both articles lament a failure by the head of the athletic department to do their duty as caretaker of a crown jewel program at UCLA. Both articles paint a picture of laziness and dysfunction, of an administrator unfit for the role he possesses.

Thankfully, that person is no longer in said role, as UCLA announced that Martin Jarmond had been relieved of his duties as athletic director effective immediately. The timing of the announcement, on the Monday before UCLA football is set to kick off its first season under Bob Chesney, may seem auspicious, but longtime watchers of the program would tell you this bullet has been coming for a long time.

This article is not meant to be an exhaustive survey of Jarmond’s failings; if you want that, those two articles at the top are a good place to start, along with this article from last September from Joe, which broke down many of the issues Jarmond is responsible for around football. As a quick recap, that chain of events goes as follows:

• Jarmond had a chance to get out from Kelly in 2021, decided against it and instead signed him to an extension.

• Jarmond had a second opportunity to make a clean break in November 2023 after back-to-back bad losses to Arizona and Arizona State. Instead, chooses to let Kelly play out the season, and Kelly “saves” his job with a convincing win over a bad Southern Cal team.

• “Read the room” happens, followed by an embarrassing loss to UC Berkeley.

• Kelly spends all offseason shopping himself around to other programs while Jarmond refuses to fire him.

• Kelly leaves in February of 2024, well outside the normal hiring window. Jarmond is unprepared for this, and panic-hires Deshaun Foster. Cue two years of disaster.

There is more, and we will talk about it below, but I bring these earlier articles up to point out that this has been a years-long story. That article regarding gymnastics? It’s from 2022. The Deshaun Foster one? 2024. This has been a six-year odyssey with Martin Jarmond in charge, and UCLA has finally stopped eating the lotus flower and is preparing to head home.

Part of the problem with Jarmond is how unprepared he was for the college athletics landscape to shift. Jarmond was hired in 2020, right in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in his first year, we were rightly praising him for his ability to adapt, praising his handling of the pandemic and securing an apparel deal with Nike/Jordan after Under Armour cancelled their contract. But hidden near the end of that article was a question of how UCLA under Jarmond would handle the impending rise of NIL, and the answer would be poor. From an October article I wrote (which, again, was calling for Jarmond to be fired):

As athletic director, Martin Jarmond’s job is to understand the shifting college sports landscape and best position UCLA for athletic success. In the modern game, that means understanding the role of Name, Image, and Likeness rights, or NIL, in creating a strong football program.

The problem here is that Jarmond and the athletic department under him have never embraced NIL in a way that would lead to success. The athletic department is neutral towards NIL at best and outright hostile towards NIL at worst. I think, on a basic level, Jarmond and the athletic department do not understand the correlation between NIL funds and athletic success, instead seeming to believe good old-fashioned recruiting and coaching is enough to overcome the funding support of their rivals. This is not a Jarmond-specific problem - you could write a book about all the times UCLA has been late to adapt to a changing college landscape in the last quarter century - but if Jarmond is more supportive of NIL efforts, he has a weird way of showing it.

Nothing signifies this hostility more than the actions of the Wooden Athletic Fund, the fundraising arm of the athletic department. According to multiple accounts, the Fund has spent the better part of the past few years trying to steer donors away from giving to UCLA’s various NIL collectives like Men of Westwood and instead donating to the WAF instead. Given UCLA’s budget issues over the past few years, it is understandable that UCLA would favor donations to the school; however, this is a good example of the athletic department’s shortsightedness. The athletic department is seemingly unfamiliar with the most common adage of Los Angeles sports: the city loves a winner, and if you show you aren’t interested in winning, then fans aren’t interested in supporting you. By alienating fans with a subpar product on the field, brought on by a lack of NIL funds leading to poor talent acquisition, UCLA loses out on millions and millions of dollars in future donations.

There are reports that Martin Jarmond is hostile towards NIL because he believes that the forthcoming revenue share model will level the playing field and lead to a deemphasis of NIL. In that regard, he is half-right; rev share will create a more even playing field for so many programs, but only because it creates a floor that many of these schools will operate at. The bigger problem is that Jarmond may be one of the few administrators in the country who believes NIL will disappear with the implementation of revenue sharing. In reality, NIL is not going away, but instead becoming more powerful as it allows schools to go above the base rev share amount and acquire the best talent possible.

Fundraising was further complicated by Jarmond’s failure to nurture relationships with donors. Ben Bolch had an article when he was with the LA Times that dove into the problems on that front, highlighting that there were a number of donors who chose to sit on the sidelines and not donate to UCLA until Jarmond was removed. Jarmond was increasingly withdrawn from UCLA events, removing himself from the fans more often than not; for example, Jarmond was a constant staple at UCLA basketball games early in his tenure, but in the last few years he would make just quick appearances, sticking to the high-end donor sections and trying not to get in public spats with said donors.

Not that I think Mick Cronin and Cori Close minded having to see less of Martin Jarmond. We’ve focused on football in many of these Jarmond discussions because it is the biggest revenue generator for athletics and the most obvious example of Jarmond’s failure, but it should be noted that Jarmond essentially had no power when it came to either basketball program. I know people have a negative view of Cronin currently, but it cannot be said that Cronin doesn’t know how to build and manage relationships, and all of the NIL success that UCLA men’s basketball has is largely due to his ability to raise that money. Ditto with Coach Close and the women’s team, which had to go out and raise money without the help of the athletic department despite coming off a national championship. Who knows what the future of those two programs will look like with new leadership that is actually supportive of their efforts?

For Chancellor Julio Frenk, this decision feels like the culmination of a year of planning. There were rumblings back during the football coaching search that Jarmond’s job was not secure, and while Jarmond was ultimately retained, it was reported that he was sidelined during the Chesney recruitment, which in hindsight should have been a sign that his days were numbered. A few weeks ago, it was reported that Frenk had hired Tim Harris, the former President of Business Operations, Chief Marketing Officer for the Lakers, to do an audit of the athletic department, an act that now seems like it was done as a pretense for firing Jarmond and putting Harris in charge. Still, Frenk should be commended for following through and pulling the trigger on firing a UCLA athletic director for the first time in school history. Frenk clearly learned a thing or two from his time as the leader at the University of Miami, which means that the Hurricanes have finally started to pay UCLA back for 1998.

In the end, what really did Martin Jarmond in was his inability to understand what makes UCLA special. This is the school of Jackie Robinson, of Rafer Johnson, of Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton and Arthur Ashe and Troy Aikman and Ann Meyers and so many countless others that no other school can hope to stand up to. This is a school that has a proud athletic heritage, yet Jarmond continually told UCLA fans that they should settle for just being good enough. There’s a story that is again making the rounds of Jarmond telling a group of donors that UCLA fans should be grateful if the program went 7-5 on a consistent basis, and I think that story is a microcosm of Jarmond’s failures. Jarmond wanted nothing more than to manage expectations, because a complacent UCLA fanbase was never going to question his performance as athletic director, and then he could keep collecting checks for as long as possible.

For Martin Jarmond, doing just enough was considered a success, and he saw UCLA fans as being unrealistic for expecting more. And now that he is gone, UCLA fans can go back to dreaming of a better world again.

Go Bruins!

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