How Will New Cal Chancellor Rich Lyons Deal with Golden Bears Athletics?

Pac-12 presidents and chancellors got much of the blame for the demise of the conference. Is Rich Lyons knowledgeable enough about TV's financial importance to big-time athletics to put Cal in a good place athletically? Will he cut some sports?

Rich Lyons, an established economist and former dean of the Haas School of Business, has been named the next Chancellor at Cal, but what the Golden Bears coaches and athletes want to know is whether he will be an expert on the ever-changing, complicated issues involved in big-time, big-money college sports.

Lyons, who will be Berkeley's 12th chancellor, will succeed Chancellor Carol Christ, who is due to step down on July 1.

Lyons graduated from Cal in 1982 with degrees in business and finance, so he should have a grasp on the financial issues facing Cal’s athletic department as it heads into the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2024-25.

Will Lyons decide that some sports need to be eliminated at Cal? Will he be able to help manage the financial burden facing Cal athletics in the coming years, when Cal will be getting a reduced portion of the ACC’s revenue for a while? Is he knowledgeable enough about the financial role that TV media and media rights play in big-time sports to help shepherd Cal through subsequent conference moves? Will he be a friend to Cal athletics in general, and does he care whether the Golden Bears remain in a power conference and have a competitive program in football and men’s and women’s basketball?

There is no indication that he was directly involved in athletics while at Cal as an undergraduate. However, he attended Cal football games as a teenager, and, as a Cal student, he was in Memorial Stadium for the 1982 Big Game that featured The Play, the five-lateral kickoff return that game Cal a 25-20 victory over Stanford.

(Click here for the entire report about the announcement of Lyons as Cal's next chancellor.)

Many in the media reported that it was the actions or inactions Pac-12 presidents and chancellors that led to the demise of the conference.

Washington State president Kirk Schulz, a college president for 15 years, made this statement a few months ago about the changing role of college presidents in today’s athletic climate:

“Athletics now require more of the president’s time by far than when I started as a president. It used to be you went to your conference [meeting], you sort of interacted with the other presidents, but I would say largely you were focused around the academic mission of your particular institution. The amount of time and buy-in that you would need to take to be informed, not simply show up at the meetings, but really be informed is very different now than it was.

“I think new presidents when they start, or new chancellors, I say you’ve got to have a strategic relationship with your athletic director. You may say, ‘I don’t want to deal with sports,’ or ‘I’ll let someone else do that,’ and modern presidents cannot do that anymore. And so you have to be really informed about the business of how it all works. And I don’t mean how much you spend on lacrosse at your school. But I mean the business of ESPN, Fox, all those media partners. You can’t just show up three times a year and hope to be successful.

“So I think it has fundamentally changed, and that’s not going away. There’ll be continued reshuffling, but college presidents have to do that.”

Berkeley News provided this information about Lyons:

“Lyons, 63, the first UC Berkeley undergraduate alumnus since 1930 to become the campus's top leader. In an interview this week, Lyons said he credits his Berkeley roots and his campus mentors with encouraging him to ask big questions, advance institutional culture and enhance public education — all priorities of his for the years to come.”

Lyons received his Ph.D in economics from MIT in 1987, and he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1993. He was dean of the Haas School of Business from 2008 to 2018, and has been chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer since 2020.

"No institution has come anywhere close to Berkeley in terms of shaping my life," Lyons said in statement provided by the university. "There's this favorite phrase of mine: 'You can't be what you can't see.' Neither of my parents had a four-year degree when I arrived at Berkeley. For so many reasons, in so many ways, I could have never seen the life I have lived were it not for my undergraduate years at Berkeley." 

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