Vols reward Vitello with record $3 million deal

Tennessee’s Tony Vitello, rewarded with the largest contract in college baseball history, said his sights are set squarely on continuing the climb coming off the Volunteers’ historic 2024 national championship season.

“Now, we literally have facts that we can show recruits and everybody else that we’re as committed to baseball as you can possibly imagine,” Vitello told ESPN on Friday. “As a coaching staff, our administration and [athletic director] Danny White have given us peace of mind that there’s not anything better out there as far as support or investment. You throw in the combination that we live in one of the best college towns in the country, we’re the flagship school of the state and the passion of our fans, and it doesn’t get any better.”

Vitello’s new deal, announced earlier in the day by the university, will pay him $3 million annually and runs through the 2029 season. His annual salary would place him among Major League Baseball’s 10 highest-paid managers, according to MLB insiders.

The contract also includes an expanded salary pool for his assistants and support staff, replacing one that Tennessee and Vitello agreed upon that took effect May 31, although that deal was never announced. Vitello was previously set to make $1.8 million annually. He collected a $200,000 bonus for winning Tennessee’s first baseball national championship this season.

Since arriving in Knoxville in 2018, Vitello has transformed Tennessee into a baseball powerhouse. The Volunteers became the first SEC team in history to win 60 games 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.

“It’s a never-ending process, especially when you include facilities and you include recruiting, but it’s also just trying to survive in the SEC, which everybody that’s been a part of it or even just watches it from the outside knows how challenging that is,” Vitello said. “So I don’t feel like we’re anywhere near done climbing in a bunch of different categories, even though we were able to have a successful postseason run this year.

“The cool thing about what people are talking about today is I feel like our staff has been rewarded for our loyalty. You’d be hard-pressed to find a member of our coaching staff that couldn’t have gone somewhere else for more money at some point. I think college baseball, and I say this humbly, but college baseball has gotten more attention and more of everything over the past few years.”

Per the terms of Vitello’s deal, he will owe the university $4 million if he leaves for another job before June 30, 2025. 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 deal, he will be owed the full remainder of his contract.

If White is no longer Tennessee’s athletic director, Vitello’s buyout will be cut in half if he leaves for another job.

When Vitello was hired in 2018, his original contract paid him a base salary of $493,000 annually. He has taken the Volunteers 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 title 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.

Tennessee’s success under Vitello has been a massive hit with 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.

“At first, people started coming out in numbers, and then next they started getting rowdy to where we had the ‘Legends of Lindsey Nelson’ with the students,” Vitello said. “The outfield porches became a party, and it got so intense inside of that environment that it was like a rock ‘n’ roll concert. The demand for seats was crazy, so that climb was something we can literally see as a visual and one of the more gratifying and cooler things we’ve seen as coaches and players.”

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. Schlossnagle’s contract at Texas will pay him an annual average salary of $2.2 million. Vanderbilt’s Tim Corbin earns $2 million annually. Vitello becomes college baseball’s first $3 million coach.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say we had a lot of very ambitious people we were able to add to that first coaching staff and we didn’t achieve a whole lot on the field at all,” Vitello said. “We were bitter and wanted to get to work, and there was the underlying question: ‘Is this a place where you can sustain success?’ We definitely thought after 2019 that we could put enough pieces of the puzzle together to advance in a regional and maybe further. Then in 2021, it became very clear to us because of the fan support and because of what the administration was stepping up and doing for us, that the formula is there.

“So why would we look anywhere else?”