Kalani Sitake set his resignation from BYU today
It isn’t a secret that BYU doesn’t shell out top dollar for their coaching staff of the biggest revenue sports. A recent column from the Salt Lake Tribune may show exactly how big that disparity is right now though.
On Friday night, Gordon Monson at the Trib penned a column that doubted BYU’s commitment to football excellence due to its lack of financial commitment. The general thesis is probably not one that’s unfamiliar to Cougar fans, but there were a few specifics that may constitute new information, or at least, new reported information.
Based on conversations with sources associated with the school’s athletics, that’s not likely to drastically change anytime soon, although it has gotten a bit better. It’s not as though Kalani Sitake is making chump change — estimates on his salary range as high as $1.5 million a year, with half of that amount coming from the school, half coming from a wealthy group of BYU boosters known as the Coaches Circle whose purpose is to raise — or donate — money with the aim of the Cougars hiring and retaining quality coaches in both basketball and football
As a private institution, BYU is not obligated to release their contracts to the public, and as far as I know, this is the first time a major outlet has published a number after Sitake’s hiring. Based on what I was hearing during the hiring process, and reading between the lines here a little bit, I’d guess Sitake’s base compensation is actually a little *less* than $1.5 million for this year, but could grow to that point, either via incentives or built-in bumps over the course of the deal. But that’s just my personal guess.
