Vols make Vitello highest-paid NCAA baseball coach at $3M

Tennessee’s Tony Vitello, fresh off the Vols’ first baseball national championship in school history, has received a new five-year deal that will pay him $3 million annually and make him the highest-paid coach in college baseball, the school announced Friday.

Vitello, since arriving in Knoxville in 2018, has transformed Tennessee into a baseball powerhouse. The Vols became the first SEC team in history to win 60 games this season on their way to capturing the national title with a 6-5 victory over Texas A&M in the deciding game.

Vitello has taken Tennessee to the Men’s College World Series in three of the past four seasons and to the super regionals all four seasons. During that span, Tennessee ranks first nationally with 211 wins and a .773 winning percentage.

“Tony and his staff have developed the country’s top baseball program, and we are excited to announce this long-term extension to keep Tony on Rocky Top,” Tennessee athletic director Danny White said in a release. “As an athletics department, we aim to lead the way in college sports, and Tony has created a baseball program that sets the standard across the entire sport.”

This new deal replaces one that Tennessee and Vitello agreed upon that went into effect on May 31, 2024, although that deal was never announced. Vitello was previously set to make $1.8 million annually. He received a $200,000 bonus for winning the MCWS, and part of the new deal includes an increase in the salary pool for his assistant coaches and support staff.

“With the new hires we made this summer, we wanted to take care in solidifying what we knew was inevitable, that being our athletic department and coaching staff wanting to be teammates for a long time,” Vitello said in a release. “Our staff and our program take confidence in the fact that our administration is more invested in our sport than anywhere else in the country when you consider resources, their commitment to our staff and the stadium project. At the end of the day, we know our Vol fans are the origin of these resources and we look forward to continually working hard to make them proud to be a part of Vol Nation.”

Tennessee’s success under Vitello has also been a hit among the fans. Record crowds have flocked to Lindsey Nelson Stadium, which is undergoing a multiyear $98.5 million renovation project that will increase seating capacity to the 8,000 range and include personal suites, increased premium seating options, expanded concourse space and a new concourse connecting the left-field porches to the right-field student area.

Other schools have pursued Vitello aggressively in recent years, including Texas A&M in 2021 and again this year after Jim Schlossnagle left for Texas.

Vitello becomes the first college baseball coach to hit the $3 million plateau. Schlossnagle’s new deal at Texas will pay him an average of $2.2 million annually, while Vanderbilt’s Tim Corbin earns $2 million annually.

Vitello’s new deal will run through June 30, 2029, and according to Major League Baseball insiders, his $3 million annual salary would place him among the top 10 highest-paid MLB managers.

If Vitello were to leave Tennessee for another job before June 30, 2025, he would owe the university $4 million. That buyout drops to $3 million in 2026, $2 million in 2027 and all the way down to $400,000 the last year of the contract in 2029. If Tennessee fires Vitello without cause during the term of the contract, he would be owed the entire remainder of his contract. Also, if White is no longer Tennessee’s AD, Vitello’s buyout would be cut in half if he were to leave for another job.

When Vitello was hired in 2018, his original contract paid him $493,000 annually. He has taken the Vols to five NCAA tournaments and won two of the past three SEC tournaments. They became the first No. 1 overall seed to win the national championship this season since Miami in 1999. Tennessee had four players selected in the first two rounds of the MLB draft this year, a program record, and two were first-rounders — Christian Moore and Blake Burke.