NIL

Martin Jarmond is not a particularly popular figure these days.

Some fans frustrated by UCLA’s winless football team are expected to wear “Fire Jarmond” shirts in blue and gold to Saturday’s game at the Rose Bowl against Penn State. One group has organized an airplane banner to fly over the stadium before the game, with a similar message directed at the beleaguered Bruins athletic director.

The list of grievances is a lengthy one, leading a group of nearly a dozen high-level donors to reach out to The Times about what they allege is a pattern of rampant dysfunction inside the athletic department that goes well beyond the surprise hiring and speedy dismissal of football coach DeShaun Foster on Sept. 14 after only 15 games.

Among other things, the donors also questioned Jarmond’s name, image and likeness strategy, high spending despite years of running up massive athletic department deficits and failure to fire coach Chip Kelly amid subpar results.

“What’s happening now feels like watching a trainwreck in slow motion,” said Scott Tretsky, a donor and season ticket-holder for more than two decades. “What we’re seeing isn’t just a rough patch. It’s institutional apathy. And if the administration doesn’t care, why should fans and recruits?

“This isn’t a casual fan speaking. I rarely miss a game. I’ve invested time, money, and emotion for decades, and right now, it feels like the people running the show don’t share that same investment. This program could thrive. It has the history, the fan base, the resources. But it needs leadership with courage and a real plan. Right now, we have neither.”

One misstep made a donor question whether operations inside Jarmond’s athletic department were even worse than they appeared on a surface level.

Ten days before a group of donors departed for a trip to watch UCLA’s football team play Utah in 2023, an email outlining the itinerary was sent with an unexpected attachment — a database revealing personal information and spending habits of the athletic department’s biggest supporters.

Included in the spreadsheet sent to several dozen donors was the home address, email address and phone numbers of Bruins football legend Troy Aikman. Separate columns included the lifetime giving and annual Wooden Athletic Fund contributions of more than 200 top donors such as sports executive Casey Wasserman, ice cream magnate Justin Woolverton and philanthropist Wallis Annenberg, with each donor assigned a priority number based on their level of generosity.

UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond stands alongside UCLA football coach DeShaun Foster during his introductory news conference.

(Damian Dovarganes/AP)

The donor, who did not want to his name published because of the sensitivity of the data in the spreadsheet, told The Times he spoke with others who were equally incredulous about receiving such revealing information in the email from an associate athletic director for fundraising who is no longer employed by UCLA.

There was no apology or further communication besides a follow-up email from the associate athletic director sent 26 minutes after the first one, simply recalling the message. A UCLA athletic department spokesperson declined to comment about the incident other than to say the employee involved in the unauthorized distribution of information and his direct supervisor no longer worked for the university.

“I would assume with something like this where they knew what happened, they should just do something like say, ‘I’m so sorry, this was an internal working file, we’re doing everything we can’ to rectify it. Just something,” the donor who received the information said. “If I wanted to pitch something to Troy Aikman, I have the information to do it with.”

Soon after Jarmond and another athletic department staffer were informed that The Times was writing about Jarmond’s stewardship of the athletic department, five donors called to speak on Jarmond’s behalf. They cited financial constraints that prevented the athletic director from firing Kelly, Foster’s hiring as his attempt to make the best of a bad situation and a belief that Jarmond could help raise the resources needed to hire a far more successful replacement.

Other donors have already decided they are giving up on big giving.

As a result of his unhappiness with the way the athletic department is being run, one donor who was close to joining the 1919 Society that recognizes those who have given at least $1 million said he had abandoned that endeavor.

Part of his dissatisfaction is rooted in a dinner conversation with Jarmond at a Tucson steakhouse before UCLA played Arizona in October 2021. Asked to share his favorite UCLA sports moment, the donor said it was the football team’s having won three Rose Bowls and a Fiesta Bowl while he was a student in the early to mid-1980s.

According to the donor and two others at the table, Jarmond called the donor’s expectations unrealistic and said that historically, UCLA had won an average of seven to eight games a year, suggesting those should be the expectations going forward.

Asked about the exchange, Jarmond said that “without getting into specifics of my conversations with any one individual, my intended message whenever this subject arises is that dynasties in college football are increasingly rare. In today’s environment, with the implementation of revenue-sharing, NIL and the transfer portal, it’s harder than ever to sustain success at the highest level. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the goal. Competing for championships is and always has been core to our mission.”

Several donors questioned the commitment to NIL within Jarmond’s athletic department.

After one donor made a second large NIL contribution, he said, he was chided by one high-ranking athletics official who told him that his money would have been better spent going to the Wooden Athletic Fund that supports the entire department. Donors have criticized Jarmond for not getting Kelly to do more work to support the football team’s NIL efforts, leading to the team lagging far behind its conference counterparts, and was also slow to publicly recognize and support Men of Westwood, the collective spearheading UCLA’s NIL endeavors.

Several donors said UCLA has misunderstood NIL from the start, using small initiatives such as Westwood Exchange as a substitute for helping the Bruins stay more competitive with other schools that understood that pay-for-play was an accepted practice. Once revenue sharing started this summer, allowing the school to pay athletes directly, UCLA further de-emphasized the importance of having a robust NIL program even though it’s widely believed that the new model will eventually resemble the old one.

Jarmond pointed to UCLA’s partnering with NIL agency Article 41 to enhance athletes’ personal brands and social media presence as evidence of the school’s commitment to being on the forefront of the NIL space.

“We’re gonna provide whoever the next [football] coach is with the resources and a financial investment that we haven’t done before, quite frankly,” Jarmond said.

UCLA teams have won six NCAA championships under Jarmond’s watch and posted more conference titles last season than any other Big Ten team. The move to the Big Ten is also expected to provide additional revenue to help stabilize the athletic department’s finances, which required a university bailout and drew a sharp rebuke from the executive board of the school’s academic senate after running $219.55 million in the red over the last six fiscal years.

Jim Bendat, a men’s basketball season ticket-holder and longtime fan, said the athletic director faced some unique challenges that constrained his success with the football program.

“I have some sympathy for Jarmond,” Bendat said. “Money had to be an issue when he arguably should have fired Kelly immediately after the ‘23 season. Then the timing of Kelly’s departure put Jarmond in a nearly impossible situation. Basketball, baseball, softball and Olympic sports are doing fine. Is it fair to give credit for those successes only to the coaches and players, but blame only Jarmond for football failures? I don’t think that’s fair at all.

“Because football is the cash cow, that’s the big focus. I say give this AD another chance to get this right. It will be the biggest hire he will ever make, and he has to get it right this time.”

Criticisms of Jarmond, however, are growing louder and have been brewing for years.

Past concerns have involved a lack of communication when UCLA abruptly pulled out of the 2021 Holiday Bowl over COVID-19 concerns only a few hours before the scheduled kickoff. North Carolina State coach Dave Doeren blasted the Bruins for a lack of transparency about their roster situation that prevented the Wolfpack from having a backup plan, saying, “We felt lied to, to be honest.”

Jarmond said he was prioritizing the health and safety of the players and the Bruins had every intention of playing had they been able to do so responsibly.

Only a month later, Jarmond faced backlash for being slow to wade into a controversy involving a racial slur used by a member of the women’s gymnastics team. Jarmond met with the team only after Margzetta Frazier and Norah Flatley tweeted to request his help, and Frazier later described a statement that Jarmond released about the situation as “discouraging” based on the athletic department’s response to the scandal being “performative.”

Perhaps Jarmond’s biggest challenge has been an underperforming football team that’s drawn record-low crowds at the Rose Bowl.

Foster’s quick flameout after a little more than one season has led to a new opening inside the athletic department while leading a growing contingent of donors and fans to demand one more. A petition to have Jarmond resign or be removed has collected more than 1,400 signatures and a mobile billboard truck circulated Westwood last week with messages such as “UCLA Football Deserves Better Fire AD Martin Jarmond” and “$7 Million Buyout for UCLA’s AD? Failure Never Paid So Well.”

According to the terms of the contract extension he signed in May 2024 — at a time when UCLA was transitioning from outgoing chancellor Gene Block to successor Julio Frenk — Jarmond, 45, would be owed roughly $7.1 million, or the full amount of his remaining contract that runs through June 30, 2029, if he was terminated without cause.

“No single person has done more to damage the legacy and potential of UCLA football than Martin Jarmond,” said Ryan Bernard, one of the organizers of the mobile billboard truck. “From his inability to fire Chip Kelly to his unjustifiable, lazy hire of a recently departed running backs coach as head coach, Jarmond’s performance has been abysmal.”

When they chose to continue their college careers, both USC offensive lineman DJ Wingfield and UCLA wide receiver Kaedin Robinson thought the courts and NCAA had cleared the way for them to play a fifth season of football.

USC had told Wingfield as much, offering him $210,000 in NIL to join the Trojans’ offensive line. UCLA, meanwhile, offered Robinson $450,000 to be one of the Bruins’ top wideouts.

But after first seeing their waivers rejected in the spring, then suing the NCAA this summer, a U.S. District Court judge has now shut the door on either Wingfield or Robinson suiting up this fall.

Both players had hoped to prove this week in court that they were deserving of a preliminary injunction that would allow them to play out the season at USC and UCLA. Their attorneys argued that the NCAA’s Five-Year Rule, which limits athletes to four seasons in five years, violated antitrust laws by limiting athletes’ eligibility — and thus, their NIL earning potential. To block Wingfield and Robinson from playing this season, their attorneys argued, would mean causing “irreparable harm.”

But after a hearing was held for both Monday, a judge in California’s Central District court quickly rejected those claims, denying the request for injunctive relief from both players, as well as San Diego linebacker Jagger Giles.

Either could appeal the decision, but it’s unlikely that either player’s case would be heard soon enough to play the 2025 season.

Others who have challenged the NCAA’s eligibility rules in court have had inconsistent results. But in the case of Wingfield and Robinson, Judge James Selna held that the NCAA’s Five-Year Rule was not “commercial in nature” but rather a “true eligibility rule,” and therefore was not beholden to antitrust scrutiny.

Not every judge has come to the same conclusion, as a cascade of similar eligibility cases have been filed in the months since Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia won a preliminary injunction in his case against the NCAA. Pavia was granted a fifth season after challenging that the NCAA’s rule counting his junior college tenure toward his overall NCAA eligibility would unfairly limit his ability to earn NIL compensation.

The judge in Wingfield and Robinson’s case was less swayed by that argument.

“There is a subtle difference between a rule that retrains NIL compensation and a rule that limits one’s potential to negotiate a NIL agreement,” the judge wrote. “Putting aside the NIL agreements, the question of whether a player’s time has run remains in full force. The eligibility question is not tethered to the question of compensation or commercial transaction.”

In Wingfield’s case, the judge also found that the five-month delay in Wingfield requesting a temporary restraining order after being ruled ineligible in March weakened the urgency of his claims of “irreparable harm.”

Losing Wingfield will undoubtedly deal a significant blow to USC, which had been counting on Wingfield to step into a starting role along the offensive line. Without him, the Trojans will enter the season perilously thin on the interior.

Wingfield’s collegiate career began in 2019 at El Camino College, a junior college in Torrance. He left El Camino during the 2020 season because of the COVID-19 pandemic, then returned in 2021 before transferring to New Mexico in the spring of 2022.

An injury ended his first season with the Lobos before he finished a single game, but he returned to play in nine games in 2023 before transferring to Purdue, where he started along the Boilermakers’ line as a fifth-year senior in 2024.

Robinson took a similar path as Wingfield through junior college, spending one season at ASA College in Brooklyn before the pandemic, then redshirting for a season at Central Florida in 2021 before spending the next three years at Appalachian State.

Robinson was an All-Sun Belt selection at receiver last season with 53 catches for 840 yards and two touchdowns. He was expected to be one of the Bruins’ top receivers this season.

The new agency in charge of regulating name, image, likeness deals in college sports sent a letter to schools Thursday saying it had rejected deals between players and donor-backed collectives formed over the past several years to funnel money to athletes or their schools.

Those arrangements hold no “valid business purpose,” the memo said, and don’t adhere to rules that call for outside NIL deals to be between players and companies that provide goods or services to the general public for profit.

The letter to Division I athletic directors could be the next step in shuttering today’s version of the collective, groups that are closely affiliated with schools and that, in the early days of NIL after July 2021, proved the most efficient way for schools to indirectly cut deals with players.

Since then, the landscape has changed yet again with the $2.8-billion House settlement that allows schools to pay the players directly as of July 1.

Already, collectives affiliated with Colorado, Alabama, Notre Dame, Georgia and others have announced they’re shutting down. Georgia, Ohio State and Illinois are among those that have announced plans with Learfield, a media and technology company with decades of licensing and other experience across college athletics, to help arrange NIL deals.

Outside deals between athlete and sponsor are still permitted, but any worth $600 or more have to be vetted by a clearinghouse called NIL Go that was established by the new College Sports Commission and is being run by the auditing group Deloitte.

In its letter to the ADs, the CSC said more than 1,500 deals have been cleared since NIL Go launched on June 11, “ranging in value from three figures to seven figures.” More than 12,000 athletes and 1,100 institutional users have registered to use the system.

But the bulk of the letter explained that many deals could not be cleared because they did not conform to an NCAA rule that sets a “valid business purpose” standard for deals to be approved.

The letter explained that if a collective reaches a deal with an athlete to appear on behalf of the collective, which charges an admission fee, the standard is not met because the purpose of the event is to raise money to pay athletes, not to provide goods or services available to the general public for profit.

The same would apply to a deal an athlete makes to sell merchandise to raise money to pay that player because the purpose of “selling merchandise is to raise money to pay that student-athlete and potentially other student-athletes at a particular school or schools, which is not a valid business purpose” according to the NCAA rule.

Sports attorney Darren Heitner, who deals in NIL, said the guidance “could disproportionately burden collectives that are already committed to spending money on players for multiple years to come.”

“If a pattern of rejections results from collective deals submitted to Deloitte, it may invite legal scrutiny under antitrust principles,” he said.

On a separate track, some college sports leaders, including the NCAA, are seeking a limited form of antitrust protection from Congress.

The letter said a NIL deal could be approved if, for instance, the businesses paying the players had a broader purpose than simply acting as a collective. The letter uses a golf course or apparel company as examples.

“In other words, NIL collectives may act as marketing agencies that match student-athletes with businesses that have a valid business purpose and seek to use the student’s NIL to promote their businesses,” the letter said.

Pells writes for the Associated Press.

When Charles Dickens began his 1859 novel “A Tale of Two Cities” with the legendary line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” who knew that it would aptly describe the state of amateur football in 2025?

From college athletics to high school athletics, if you’re a parent, coach, athlete or fan, you have plenty of stories to tell. Take notes, because there’s so much material you’ll be able to write a book, launch a podcast or participate in court cases still to be decided.

“It’s all crazy,” said future Hall of Fame football coach Matt Logan of Corona Centennial.

Football isn’t in a crisis but it is in a black hole with stakeholders seeking an escape path.

With final rules still not adopted in how name, image and likeness is supposed to work and college programs not only paying their own athletes but high school recruits, too, everyone is adjusting on the fly. Parents trying to navigate the changes are hiring agents, who are showing up to high school camps trying to find clients. There’s the college transfer portal and something similar in high school that saw more than 17,000 students switch schools in California last year.

Until NIL rules are figured out, it’s roll your eyes and don’t be surprised at anything.

Some elite high school players have been reclassifying their graduation years to take advantage of money opportunities. And that’s after parents held them back entering high school to be bigger, stronger and faster as a 16-year-old freshman.

It’s all legal and even logical but the changing landscape is riddled with pros and cons and bad actors.

One big concern in high school sports is that parents might be too focused on scholarships for their kids and earning NIL money while forgetting the real reason people play sports — for the love of the game.

“For me, the whole value in sports has been degenerated,” Logan said. “You don’t play sports to get a scholarship. You play to learn how to lead, how to take orders, how to be a good teammate, how to work together. This could be the only chance to have fun, play with their friends, have a great experience.”

There have been football scandals in recent years — twice at Narbonne High, which had City Section championships taken away in 2019 and 2024 for using ineligible players. Now the football community is focused on what the Southern Section intends to do this fall about Bishop Montgomery, which supposedly has numerous transfer students (some from Narbonne) and is so confident it’ll ‘ll be declared eligible that a trip to Hawaii and a nonleague game against powerful Mater Dei have been scheduled.

Every week, coaches have to decide how to deal with players and parents who have little patience and many options. It’s a balancing act, and for the elite of the elite, coaches can’t even count on juniors returning as seniors because of opportunities to skip ahead to college.

“I understand why they are doing it. They have my full support,” said Sierra Canyon coach Jon Ellinghouse, who’s losing star defensive lineman Richard Wesley to Oregon a year early after he reclassified to the class of 2026.

Ellinghouse is embracing the idea his job is to “put them into positions to have life-changing opportunities.”

There are many different paths to success and failure. Remember how LaVar Ball didn’t care that his youngest son, LaMelo, was 13 years old playing summer basketball as a freshman for Chino Hills. He threw him in against older players and the rest is history. He averaged 25.2 points this season for the Charlotte Hornets as a 23-year-old in his fifth NBA season.

There are others who were 19-year-old seniors in high school, stopped developing, kept switching schools and will probably blame their coaches for not making the pros when the truth is it’s difficult to become a professional athlete.

It is the best of times with all kinds of money to be given out for being a good athlete. It is the worst of times because many of the treasured lessons from playing amateur sports no longer receive priority treatment. What happened to the importance of getting a college degree?

It will take someone with magical ideas to return a balance to the amateur sports world.

The NBA draft combine concludes this weekend, and the draft is next month. However, before I dive into what kind of player the Los Angeles Lakers should pursue, I need to remind you of three significant economic shifts.

The first began in 1994 when Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson asked the Milwaukee Bucks for a $100-million contract after the team made him the No. 1 pick. Robinson eventually signed a 10-year, $68-million contract (the richest ever for a rookie), but the following year the league said goodbye to open-ended contracts for rookies. Today rookie deals are four years max.

Next, in 2006, the NBA changed eligibility rules requiring players to be at least 19 or one year removed from high school before entering the draft. This was because of the glut of high school phenoms who turned into pro duds.

And finally, in July 2021, the NCAA’s “name, image, likeness” policy went into effect. That means any senior in this year’s draft is part of the first full class of ball players who could monetize their entire college playing career.

All of which affects the answer to the pressing question: What kind of player should the Lakers pursue in next month’s draft?

The kind who had access to excess on a college campus for four years and proved they can handle the temptations that money and fame can bring. The kind that already had opportunities to make emotional or childish mistakes on the court or perhaps in a social media post and learned from them. The kind of player who didn’t get a real senior year in high school but made the best out of the cards they were dealt. Resiliency isn’t something that can be measured at the combine, which is ironic because without it, all the measurable qualities add up to nothing.

The league’s economic shifts made a “high ceiling” — meaning a lot of potential, but not a proven track record — the most sought-after quality in the NBA draft. As a result, players who can legally drink fell out of favor with scouts.

Consider, Michael Jordan was drafted in 1984 at the age of 21. At the time he was a relative youngster: The average age in the draft was 22.3. Before the eligibility rule change, Kobe Bryant was drafted at 17, and the average age had dipped to 22. When Lebron James was 18 in 2003, the average was 21.5. Last year the average was down to 20.

How has this affected the college game? In 2012, Kentucky won the NCAA title with a roster that was about 19.7 years old. In 2021, Baylor University won with players who averaged 22.3 in age.

While the Lakers roster is in desperate need of a big man — something that was made painfully clear in this year’s first-round playoffs loss — they likely won’t find the next Shaq with their No. 55 pick. But they could find the next Austin Reaves, who went undrafted as a 23-year-old senior in 2021.

That’s not to say youth isn’t a good thing. Only that with the advancement of technology and nutrition, “youth” has been greatly extended for professional athletes. Players in their late 20s are likely to still be in their prime performance years, not aging out. And LeBron James and the NHL’s Alex Ovechkin aren’t the only 40-year-old world-class examples to point to. Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn came out of retirement last fall and at 40 placed second in an event in March. What was considered old for an athlete when Jordan was drafted is not applicable today.

My hope is the Lakers comb through the entire NCAA spectrum and draft a 24-year-old college graduate who has NIL money in the bank and a good head on his shoulders. Critics of NIL complain that the new system makes it hard to build a good college program because players are constantly chasing money and have no team loyalty. I say it’s better to learn the lessons that can come from that while on a college campus than in the higher-stakes world of pro sports.

Back in the day, talented but raw college players felt pressured to earn money and would enter the league too early. Sometimes it was to protect their prospects of being drafted based on potential, before they had enough of a record that they would be judged on their accomplishments instead. Now, in the era of NIL cash and transferring among colleges, a promising 18-year-old can make a case to finish his degree before trying to go pro — maturing as a player, a student and a businessman without giving up his dream of being in the NBA.

No doubt the Lakers need a big man.

If they hold on to the pick, they should be sure to draft a grown-up as well.

@LZGranderson