Vanderbilt announces contract extension for Mark Byington amid job rumors
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Vanderbilt has made sure that head basketball coach Mark Byington is going nowhere.
The school announced on Saturday that it has agreed to a long-term extension with the 49-year-old Virginia native who led Vanderbilt to the second round of this year’s NCAA Tournament. The Commodores were 1 miracle shot that barely missed from getting to the Sweet 16, after Byington also led Vandy to the SEC Tournament title game earlier this month.
Byington is the first head coach in Vanderbilt men’s basketball history to win 20 or more games in each of his first 2 seasons in Nashville. Byington had been rumored as a candidate to replace Hubert Davis as the head coach at North Carolina, but Vandy has made sure that Byington is locked up for the long term and not heading to Chapel Hill.
Terms of the extension hadn’t been made official as of early Saturday night.
The extension was announced by Vanderbilt athletic director Candice Storey Lee. The school was determined not to let Byington get away after he led the Commodores to back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances for the first time in almost 10 years.
Byington has been a booming success since he stepped foot in Nashville for the 2024-25 season. He led Vandy to a 20-13 record in his first season, which was an 11-game improvement over the previous year’s team. But Byington took things to a whole new level this past season, with Vanderbilt going 27-9 and earning a No. 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Those 27 victories were just 1 short of the program’s single-season record. Byington’s team also tied the best start in Vanderbilt history by winning its first 16 games of the season.
Vanderbilt is out of the Final Four picture after getting knocked out in the second round last weekend, but there are 8 teams still in the mix to get to Indianapolis. Here is what the Kalshi market is currently seeing regarding the odds for those Elite 8 teams to make the Final Four:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
