Texas athletics director Chris Del Conte will sign a 6-year contract extension that will pay him $2.9 million in 2026 and top out at a previously-unfathomable $4.25 million by the deal's end in 2036, as first reported by Kirk Bohls of the Houston Chronicle. Del Conte, 57, would be under contract until his 67th birthday. Del Conte has been at Texas since 2017 following AD runs at Rice and TCU.
The extension is pending the approval of the University of Texas Board of Regents, which is as foregone a conclusion as the sun setting tonight. The deal will take him past Tennessee's Danny White, who last August signed a contract to make him the highest-paid AD in the country at $2.75 million in salary, with 5 percent annual raises.
Always a behemoth at making money, Del Conte has managed to marshal Texas's considerable financial resources into turning the Longhorns into a heavyweight on the field of play. Texas has won four of the last five NACDA Directors' Cups, given to the top overall athletics department in the country. The year the Longhorns didn't win it, they finished second.
UT's Directors' Cup victory in 2020-21 broke a stranglehold by Stanford that dated back nearly to the trophy's creation. After North Carolina won the inaugural Cup in 1993-94, Stanford won it every year until Texas's win in 2020-21. After fending off USC for the Cup in 2024-25, Texas is now in the hunt for its third straight crown.
Always a formidable winner in Olympic sports, Del Conte's tenure has been marked by the Longhorns getting everything straightened out in the major, money-making sports. Texas football has won 25 games over the past two seasons and begins 2025 ranked No. 1; softball won its first national championship last season; baseball entered the NCAA tournament as the No. 1 seed under first-year head coach Jim Schlossnagle; volleyball won national championships in 2022-23; and women's basketball reached the Final Four for the first time in 20 years last spring. Only men's basketball has failed to play among the national elite of late, and that comes with an asterisk: Texas reached the Elite Eight in 2023 under interim head coach Rodney Terry following Chris Beard's mid-season firing; Sean Miller now begins his first season later this year after Terry failed to make it out of the First Four in March.
Del Conte has also injected life into the sometimes-sleepy Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium atmosphere by starting a pre-game concert series called Longhorn City Limits.
Texas is still really good at making money, too. In the 2024 fiscal year, Texas became the first school to make and spend more than $300 million in an athletic year.