It's a scenario that we all envisioned the moment we all learned about the existence of collectives back in 2021: what happens when a collective and the football program it supports disagree? Does the money spigot shut off?
Turns out the answer is yes, at least at Cal.
Kevin Kennedy, president of California Legends Collective, the only collective supporting the Golden Bears, has stopped donating to the football program and has encouraged others to do the same until the athletics department meets his singular demand. That demand? It's not one we could have envisioned back in 2021 -- he doesn't want Cal to pursue a certain recruit or transfer, he doesn't want the coaching staff to play one quarterback over another, and he doesn't want head coach Justin Wilcox fired. Instead, he wants Cal to follow Stanford's lead by putting newly-appointed general manager Ron Rivera in charge of the football program. (The irony here: Stanford hired Luck largely because Cal football has owned them of late. The Bears have beaten the Cardinal four straight times.)
The Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year and a consensus All-American for the Golden Bears in 1983, Rivera returned to his alma mater last month on a 3-year contract paying him $800,000 a year except, unlike Stanford, Rivera doesn't have explicit oversight over all things football. Rivera will report to chancellor Rich Lyons, while Wilcox reports to AD Jim Knowlton.
“You don't hire Mario Andretti and ask him to sit in the passenger seat, right?” CLC president Kevin Kennedy told SFGATE. “There’s a reason that you bring someone like that on staff: In order to give him control.”
The CLC lists four members on its board of directors. Sitting next to Kennedy, who helped take companies like Tesla, Airbnb, and Lulemon public in his business career, are private equity managing director Greg Richardson, retired insurance executive John Stock, and Stephanie Rivera, Ron's wife.
The irony here: there's no evidence yet that Luck has given Stanford a competitive advantage over Cal. Luck fired head coach Troy Taylor last week, but only after ESPN reported that Stanford had previously commissioned multiple investigations into Taylor's workplace behavior. Frank Reich has been promoted interim head coach while Luck searches for a full-time head coach, so it'll be November at the earliest until we really learn how Luck's doing as the Cardinal's GM. Like Luck, Rivera has no previous experience running a college football program. To take it one step further, Rivera has no experience at all in college football or as a general manager. After his playing career ended in 1992, Rivera worked exclusively as an NFL coach from 1997-2023.
But it almost doesn't even matter if Rivera is good at his job or not, does it?
“Until I know the answers to the questions I posed above, I won’t personally invest more money in this enterprise,” Kennedy wrote in a letter to CLC donors. “More importantly, I cannot in good conscience ask any of you to do the same. I simply do not believe that Cal football can possibly succeed without some significant changes to how we have operated to date.”
The California Legends Collective made the announcement in an open letter on the website Bear Insider, which claims that nearly 90 percent of CLC donations come from Bear Insider readers.
Since Knowlton has arrived, Cal’s performance in its athletic endeavors have hit an all-time low, donor interest outside of the entirely donor inspired and led Caliber funds and the Cal Legends Collective have been anemic. What has pervaded the athletic department under Knowlton’s leadership is a culture of “No”. Knowlton never understood or realized the importance of Football to the success and outright survival of the school’s other sports and instead knowingly and intentionally misled donors who believe they were giving to Cal Football only to disperse those funds to other sports.... Point of fact is that the donors who created the Caliber fund and the Collective have had to fight, scratch and claw every day to overcome an Athletic Department actively standing in their way. And coaches who have succeeded in Berkeley the past seven years have done so despite rather than as a result of the support of their leadership.
For now, the university is not bowing to donor-led pressure to fire, or supplant, its AD's authority over the football program.
"I am confident we have the right people, in the right places, doing the right things in support of a Cal Athletics football program that can and will excel," Lyons, the Cal chancellor, told SFGATE. "The world of intercollegiate sports is changing rapidly, and Cal will continue to adapt rapidly to that."