The departure of USC from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten will cost each member of the league $9.8 million a year, according to an interim report given to the California Board of Regents on Wednesday during a session to examine impact of UCLA leaving with the Bruins.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the report also revealed that UCLA’s departure “could lead to another loss of roughly one-third that figure as well as the additional loss of ticket and apparel sales for remaining Pac-12 teams.”
Cal-Berkeley would be impacted the most of any of the schools in the nine UC campuses from UCLA leaving for the Big Ten. USC is not in that system but is a private university.
The topic of USC and UCLA’s departure from the Pac 12 was ordered by California Governor Gavin Newson, who did not appear at the meeting of the board of regents on Wednesday.
According to the Times, “Assessing the impact of UCLA’s move on the well-being of its athletes, the report showed that eight sports would experience significant travel consequences — baseball, men’s soccer and men’s tennis, plus women’s soccer, softball, gymnastics, women’s volleyball and women’s tennis. According to Pamela Brown, the UC vice president of institutional research and academic planning, teams could experience as much as an additional 24-hour difference in the time commitment for a Big Ten trips as opposed to ones in the Pac-12.”