Dan Hurley will receive at least $1.8 million in bonuses with UConn's national title
In addition to a net, a trophy and a ring, Connecticut men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley will collect a $500,000 bonus for the Huskies’ defeat of Purdue on Monday night in the NCAA men's tournament championship game.
A second consecutive national title means that Hurley will receive at least $1.8 million in bonuses for a season in which Connecticut becomes the first school to win consecutive national men’s titles since Florida did so in 2006-07. He could reach his contractual maximum of $2 million, depending on the team’s academic success.
Hurley received $775,000 of a possible $1 million in bonuses last season, including $175,000 connected to team academic performance, according to documents UConn provided to USA TODAY Sports in response to an open-records request. However, he and the school then renegotiated their contract, increasing his pay and his maximum annual bonus total.
His basic annual pay for this season is $5 million, which placed him seventh in USA TODAY’s annual men’s basketball coaches’ compensation survey.
Hurley came into the NCAA Tournament with a combined total of $300,000 in bonuses.
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That was from winning the Big East Conference regular season championship ($100,000), the Big East coach of the year award ($50,000), the Big East tournament title ($100,000) and the accompanying NCAA Tournament bid ($50,000).
He picked up $50,000 for UConn’s NCAA first-round win, $100,000 for reaching the round of 16 and $200,000 for each subsequent victory before Monday night’s.
Those victories assured Hurley of the $150,000 that he will receive for the Huskies being among the top 10 in the final USA TODAY Coaches poll and/or Associated Press media poll, both of which will be published Tuesday.
In addition, on Sunday, Hurley won the Naismith national men’s basketball coach of the year award – an honor that gave him another $100,000 bonus.
Hurley’s $1.8 million total to this point is $300,000 more than Kyle Smith was set to make as Washington State’s coach this season (he has since been hired by Stanford).
Hurley’s $500,000 bonus for Monday night’s win is nearly $125,000 more than venerable Vermont coach John Becker’s total compensation for this season.
Hurley’s total is likely the largest single-season total for a basketball coach at a public school. Beginning with the 2016-17 season, USA TODAY Sports has collected information about bonuses paid to coaches in conjunction with its annual pay surveys, but the schools in that survey have varied from year to year.
The surveys have been based on the teams in the NCAA Tournament in a given season, or, in more recent years, the survey has covered schools in the Power Five conferences, plus schools outside those conferences whose team has appeared in at least three of the past five NCAA tournaments.
The top bonus amount recorded by USA TODAY Sports is Virginia coach Tony Bennett’s $1.25 million for the 2018-19 season, when the Cavaliers won the NCAA championship. The only other basketball coaches to reach $1 million in bonuses in a season were Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, with $1.1 million for 2021-22, and North Carolina’s Roy Williams, with $1 million for 2016-17, when the Tar Heels won the NCAA title.