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…

UCLA is banking hard on on the field success, but their football team has underachieved, the Rose Bowl is almost always 40% empty (and they have to hand over a lot of those profits to the Rose Bowl as well), and basketball cannot make up the revenue deficit that an average football team produces.

I don't like at all what Knowlton has done to basketball, but prioritizing football is the financially prudent decision.

With basketball, Knowlton can either keep gambling on untested coaches (more excitement, but risky) or just use a low-drama placeholder (Fox). If we were routinely finishing in the middle of the Pac then, fine, I understand the low drama approach. But we're in the dregs. What's another Wyking-quality hire going to do now, make us worse? Basketball can turn around quickly due to small team size so why not keep trying?