Dan Guerrero has been UCLA’s athletic director for 6,496 days.

For the first 6,483, there were no cracks — no publicly visible cracks, at least — in the Bruins’ fiscal armor.

Then, two weeks ago, came the revelation of a plunge into the red:

An $18.9 million budget shortfall in the 2019 fiscal year that would be covered by an interest-bearing loan from campus and a projected $17 million shortfall in the 2020 fiscal year.

Guerrero, who’s retiring this spring after 18 years in charge, is under heavy criticism.

For years, he has been roasted by frustrated UCLA fans; the budget mess is merely additional fuel.

To this point, the Hotline has attempted to remain above the fiscal fray: We reported the shortfalls and lent context but purposely avoided opining on the matter.

No longer. Here and now, we’re diving in — and doing so face first.

Our opinion surely won’t be well received in dens across UCLA fandom, but the Hotline isn’t about popularity. The intent here, as always, is to assess, to inform and to enlighten as best we can.

First, let’s be clear: Guerrero is entirely responsible for the shortfalls. He’s the athletic director, and every facet of the department — finances, academics, competitive success, fundraising, etc — is his responsibility.

But is the deficit his fault?

Is this a Guerrero-specific mess?

Or could it have happened under any athletic director, at UCLA or elsewhere, at any time … and just so happened to be unfolding in the final months of Guerrero’s tenure.

That’s a different issue than responsibility, and it’s an important one for providing a final framework for his legacy.

We’re going blow-by-blow, decision-by-decision, to lay out our case.

(UCLA fans: You know where to find me.)

First, a quick sketch of the budget mess.

UCLA’s two-year shortfall, which the Hotline believes will total $36 million, is both an expense and revenue issue.

Broadly speaking, the buckets could be grouped in this manner:

— The $18.4 million paid in severance to Jim Mora and Steve Alford and in the signing bonus to Mick Cronin.

— The increase in financial support for football and the Olympic sports (roughly $13 million over the prior support level).

— The lower-than-expected revenue from football ticket sales.

That’s it, essentially: Soaring expenses, both one-time hits and annual increases, and lower-than-expected revenues.

Here we go …

The Bruins hired Mora prior to the 2012 season. The move wasn’t universally well-received, but Mora took a team that had gone 6-8 the previous year and produced a nine-win season and division title.

Everyone was delighted.

In his second season, Mora went 10-3, thumped USC, won the Sun Bowl and finished No. 16 in the AP poll.

Everyone was ecstatic.

After a 15-year downturn, the Bruins were back.

Except what happened days after the 2013 regular season?

Steve Sarkisian left Washington for USC.

The Huskies had a vacancy.

Mora was not only the hot coach but a Washington alum.

The Huskies wanted him.

And he had the most powerful agent in the business, Jimmy Sexton.

And Sexton knew he had the Bruins by the you-know-whats.

The fans didn’t want to lose Mora, and Guerrero couldn’t lose Mora. He would have been tarred-and-feathered on Bruin Walk.

Naturally, the renegotiated contract tilted heavily in Mora’s favor in its duration, amount and buyout clause:

UCLA agreed to pay Mora 80 percent of his remaining salary if he was terminated without cause.

Nobody raised a peep in protest.

The Bruins won 10 games again in 2014, and Mora remained one of the hottest coaches in the country.

Then came 2015, and a dip: UCLA stumbled down the stretch, finished with eight wins — the horror! — and lost the Foster Farms Bowl.

The calendar turned to 2016, the NFL season ended, and the Dolphins, who had spent months with an interim coach, had a vacancy. Mora’s name was attached to the job in media reports.

Did Miami plan to hire him? It doesn’t matter.

The Bruins were employing a still-hot coach who had elevated the program, produced top-20 recruiting classes and filled the Rose Bowl (80,000 for Arizona State, 76,000 for Washington State).

And they wanted to keep him.

So Guerrero extended the contract, again: Two years were added with no bump in pay and no change to the buyout clause.

Per the terms of the zero-leverage agreement from 2013, UCLA was still on the hook for 80 percent of the remaining salary — on what became a six-year deal— should Mora be fired without cause (i.e., for performance).

In our view, a solid percentage of Power Five athletic directors, but perhaps not the majority, would have done the same: They would have extended Mora then and there.

But it wasn’t a no-brainer — not like the 2013, sizzling hot, alma-mater-on-line-one extension.

Those extra two seasons, at $3.45 million per year and an 80-percent hook, would add $5.5 million to UCLA’s termination tab.

And then, two seasons later, Mora was gone.

That’s the twist in all this:

At the time of the extension, in the spring of 2016, after successive win totals of 9-10-10-8, nobody would have guessed it would all crumble in two seasons.

But when it did, the Bruins had to eat the original four plus the added two and the total soared to $12.5 million.

That’s a hefty sum, but not off-the-charts hefty (all per published reports):

Colorado settled with Mike MacIntyre for $7.2 million.

Oregon paid Mark Helfrich $8 million.

Arizona State paid Todd Graham $13 million.

Florida State paid Willie Taggart $18 million.

The agents have control. If you want to play ball, and UCLA wanted Mora, you’re at risk.

So the hammer fell in Nov. ’17, and Guerrero hired Chip Kelly.

Looking back: Questionable decision.

At the time? “I would argue it might be the greatest hire in UCLA history,” Troy Aikman said.

Many agreed. Not all, but many. And even the skeptics couldn’t have imagined the reality — 3-9 in Year One, 4-8 in Year Two and impossibly dull in both— that would unfold in the Kelly era.

Of course, Kelly wasn’t taking the job without a deeper commitment of resources, and the Bruins obliged.

They had to.

It was long overdue.

That commitment, much of it related to nutrition and meals, accounts for an $8 million increase in football operations expenses over two years (to a total of $35 million in FY19).

Without it … had the Bruins opted for the status quo, with or without Kelly … their annual football budget would have been smaller than Utah’s, smaller than Cal’s and almost $10 million smaller than Oregon’s.

That additional $8 million was the cost of keeping pace, not zooming ahead.

And yes, it’s a significant portion of the upturn in operational expenses fanning the budget shortfall.

The other increase in expenses?

Guerrero plowed about $5 million (over two years) into UCLA’s Olympic sports.

Anyone have a problem with that?

Didn’t think so.

It was the right thing to do competitively, morally and legally (i.e., Title IX).

What Guerrero didn’t foresee … what few could have foreseen … was football’s hibernation under Kelly.

The losing sapped the life out of UCLA fans, and all the empty seats at the Rose Bowl have created a shortfall in ticket revenue of at least $5 million over two years.

(The exact figure depends on how you projected 2018-19 sales to unfold based on the schedule and success. But $5 million is neither overly conservative or aggressive based on our understanding of UCLA’s budgeting process.)

Once you make the move to hire Kelly, you’re committing the resources (expenses) and presupposing a return on the investment (revenue).

So we’ve covered the Mora hiring, the backstory behind the Mora buyout, the increase in operational costs for football and the Olympic sports, and the ticket-sales whammy under Kelly.

What’s left to address?

The Alford matter.

We didn’t like the hire. Didn’t like it from the start. Mediocre coach. Bad fit.

But from a budgetary standpoint, it looks like this: The Bruins employed a coach for five-and-a-half seasons and paid him a $4 million buyout.

That isn’t beyond the reasonable range in major college basketball these days (all per published reports):

Texas A&M paid $3.5 million to cut ties with Billy Kennedy last spring.

It cost Washington State $4.2 million to fire Ernie Kent.

Alabama spent $5.5 million to buy out Avery Johnson.

Again: The cost of business.

From here, the issue isn’t Guerrero’s management of Alford’s contract and buyout — neither was ideal; neither was egregious — so much as it was decision to hire Alford in the first place.

And once Alford was cut loose, a signing bonus for his successor became inevitable.

So to summarize: The coaching changes added a one-time hit of $18.4 million, annual operational expenses jumped by about $13 million, and football ticket sales cratered for two years.

Many of the decisions were made knowing the Under Armour contract ($16 million bonus, $9 million in annual payments) would soften the blow.

And it has.

But the condensed nature of it all, combined with the empty seats, sent the Bruins deeper faster than they expected.

In our view, the downturn could have happened at any point in Guerrero’s tenure and could happen at the vast majority of Power Five schools.

Neither the shortfall itself or the reasons for it are endemic to UCLA.

Before we end, there are two more pieces to the Great Dan Guerrero Budget Deficit Blame Game (or GDGBDBG for short).

Because of two factors beyond his control, there was no safety net.

Factor 1: Campus support.

The Bruins receive a bit more than $2.5 million in student fees annually and a pittance ($60,000) in direct campus support.

That total — about two percent of their total revenues — is one of the lowest in the conference.

A sampling of subsidies for athletic departments across the Pac-12 in 2018 (based on the USA Today financial database):

Arizona State: $21.6 million

Arizona: $12.5 million

Utah: $12.4 million

Colorado: $12.3 million

Oregon State: $9.8 million

Washington State: $5.3 million

Washington: $3.8 million

UCLA: $2.6 million

Right or wrong — we’re not debating the merits of UCLA’s policy, only the impact— the Bruins have little margin for error with the budget.

Any athletic department that fires coaches in both major sports in a 13-month span, that ramps up resources, that experiences a plunge in football ticket revenue and that received limited campus support … that department is headed deep into the red.

Factor 2: The Pac-12 Networks.

Prior to the launch of the Pac-12 Networks in Aug. ’12, campus officials were given three ranges of revenue estimates once the network became fully mature:

According to a source who attended the presentation, those payout ranges were:

High end: $7 million-to-$10 million per school per year

Middle: $5 million-to-$7 million per school per year

Low end: $3 million-to-$5 million per school per year.

To this point — after seven years — the networks have yet to hit the low end of the range.

Based on data obtained from sources, from campus financial reports and from the conference, the Hotline has created a running tally of the Pac-12 Networks annual payouts to the schools:

2013: None

2014: $862,000 per school

2015 $1,677,500 per school

2016 $1,980,250 per school

2017: $2,522,167 per school

2018: $2,666,667 per school

2019: $2,910,671 per school

That’s a total of $12.6 million over seven years.

Except for UCLA, it’s not $12.6 million, because those are gross distribution figures.

In order for the Pac-12 Networks to broadcast the football and men’s basketball games not on ESPN and Fox, the schools had to repurchase the TV rights to those events from local multimedia partners.

In UCLA’s case, $5.6 million was withheld from a larger sponsorship deal with IMG over a four-year period in order to compensate IMG for the loss of the local event broadcasts.

That $5.6 million, in other words, was an expense — the cost to UCLA of joining forces with the collective to create the Pac-12 Networks.

(The repurchase amounts varied by school, depending on the terms of the multimedia contract.)

So from UCLA’s gross payout of $12.6 million, remove $5.6 million in expenses.

Over seven years, the Pac-12 Networks have paid the Bruins a mere $7 million in net revenue.

That’s ten of millions less than expected, even if we were to apply the middle range of Scott’s estimates for the last five years (once the networks became fully mature)..

It’s not even enough to pay Mora’s buyout.

Yes, 11 other schools also have received substantially less than expected from the networks.

But most of those schools receive more than two percent of operational revenue in campus support.

That combination puts the Bruins on a wickedly thin budget line.

One or two wrong turns … an unforeseen consequence … plus the cost of doing business … and suddenly you’re deep in the red.

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