Tennessee makes White SEC’s highest-paid AD

Tennessee has amended athletic director Danny White’s contract to give him a pay raise, which makes him the highest paid athletic director in the SEC.

According to the new terms of the deal in an amended contract, White will jump to an annual base salary of $2.75 million. His contract remains a six-year, rolling deal that’s through July of 2030.

The incentive structure of the contract allows him to earn more, as he can earn up to $600,000, a maximum that increased from $300,000. His private flight access also increases to “ten one-way occupied flights” from six.

White’s base salary is boosted from $2.2 million and pushes him atop of the new 16-team SEC. Texas’ Chris Del Conte is slated to make $2.32 million in the fiscal 2025 year. (His number also increases with bonuses.)

White has helped resuscitate Tennessee from the depths of a football ineptitude, leadership incompetence and searing NCAA issues. His most important move was hiring football coach Josh Heupel, who brought energy and winning back to the Vols’ program. That helped turn the battleship to making Tennessee a winner on the field and jumpstart the athletic department to both a precipitous revenue and fundraising uptick.

“When Danny says he and his team of exceptional athletics administrators and coaches are working to build the best athletics department in the country, those are not just empty words,” said Tennessee Chancellor Donde Plowman in a statement. “Danny is visionary — a leader in our conference and across the country — and is focused every day on creating the very best experiences for our student-athletes, our fans and our athletics department. That focus and commitment are yielding extraordinary results across all sports.”

Since being hired in 2021, the athletic department has built to the point where it experienced the best overall year in athletics in school history last year. That included a baseball national title and the school’s highest finish, No. 3, in the Learfield Director’s Cup that gauges overall department success.

Tennessee was one of just two power conference schools to send every program to the postseason in 2023-24. The Vols baseball championship was the athletic department’s first national title since 2009. Tennessee also has won three-straight SEC all-sports trophies.

White came to Tennessee from UCF in 2021, and he arrived with a reputation for bold leadership. He’d earned attention and scrutiny for boasting about a national title in football for UCF in 2017 and helped fuel that school’s rise to a power conference program that eventually joined the Big 12.

He arrived at Tennessee with the school reeling from the disastrous hire of former coach Phil Fulmer as athletic director, a failed move after a flailing coaching search that yielded Jeremy Pruitt. The Pruitt hire left Tennessee on probation and facing an $8 million fine from the NCAA, and a program that went 3-7 in 2020 and was operating under the cloud of scandal.

White deftly led Tennessee through the NCAA issues, which notably included no postseason ban despite allegations of 18 Level I violations.

“We have phenomenal leadership at the University of Tennessee — from our chancellor, my boss Donde Plowman, to our UT System president, Randy Boyd, and our board chair, John Compton,” said White in a statement. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve such an upwardly mobile institution with talented, supportive people all around me. Our student-athletes, coaches and staff are inspired to be a part of something bigger than themselves — powered by the best fan base in sport. Together we have an opportunity to build something extraordinary on Rocky Top. I believe that the momentum we’ve built in our first few years is only the beginning of a much more profound story.”

White is the son of former Duke and Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White, and his brother, Brian, is the athletic director at Florida Atlantic. Another brother, Mike, is the basketball coach at Georgia.