The biggest revenue generators look to be media rights and ticket sales. The biggest cost is coaching salary. The budget largely depends on the conference while ticket sales are the variable that would generate profit. And you've shown that even a best case ticket sales scenario isn't particularly lucrative.

This suggests to me that the conference's media deal is an underlying anchor dragging conference teams down and we'll just free ride until that gets renegotiated or we find revenue elsewhere. Successful teams seem to just run at a deficit or generate lots of outside cash from donors and such. It's tough to be simultaneously good at both football and basketball on a fixed budget. Guess we're a football school right now.

We're pretty good at finding good coaches for non-revenue sports so I don't think it's a competence issue. It's a money issue and the athletic department doesn't want to admit that we can't afford good coaching in sports where good coaching costs a lot, especially when competing on two fronts. (I don't think non-revenue sports are a drain or that cutting them would even make us significantly more competitive unless their costs skyrocket.)

I can't find UCLA's budget as an obvious comparison (they're often good at both sports and many others) but here's an article where they're jealous of Cal's funding. https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2022-01-29/ucla-posts-record-62-5-million-in-athletic-department-debt