A historic 2024 Sun Devil football season has yielded the highest-paid annual contract in school history.
Kenny Dillingham, who recorded an unprecedented eight-win improvement from a 3-9 2023 campaign, leading ASU to its first outright conference championship since 1996, has been handsomely rewarded with a contract extension that will pay him a base salary which is $1.7 Million higher than the previous year, paying him $5.8 Million this year. The contract extension will run through the 2029 season but is also subject to further extensions in the next five years in the event that Arizona State will be bowl-eligible during that period.
The Arizona Board of Regents meeting to approve the new salary will take place on Thursday, January 16th.
According to 2024 USA Today figures, Dillingham's new base salary of $5.8 million will elevate him from number 13 to number four among the Big 12 coaches. (Since BYU is a private institution, the salary of its head coach, Kalani Sitake, is not publicly available.)
The contract extension includes numerous incentives that can boost the ASU head coach's salary by increments between $100K and $350K, depending on the number of wins over six victories in any given season. A signing bonus of $1 million will be paid in the first 30 days of the contract extension.
Dillingham led Arizona State to a Big 12 championship in the program's first season of membership in that league. A remarkable postseason run also included advancing to the College Football Playoff quarterfinal, where ASU lost in double overtime to Texas in the Peach Bowl.
The list of accomplishments in Dillingham's two years at the helm in Tempe includes 4,700 new season tickets being sold for the 2023 season, the highest total since 2015. ASU has already sold 3,800 new season tickets for 2025, which is higher than any year between 2016 - 2024 (with the exception of 2023).
The program recorded an all-time high semester (2.99) and cumulative (2.94) GPA for scholarship football student-athletes in the Spring 2024 semester, and 60 football student-athletes had a 3.0 (or higher) GPA in the Fall 2024.
One term of this extension calls for an allotted salary budget for the hire and retention of assistant coaches of $6 Million, including $2.8 Million for football-specific support staff. Dollars earned from performance achievements are to be distributed at the discretion of Dillingam as annual, one-time bonuses for football-specific staff.
The full details of the contract extension can be found here.
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