After a couple months of speculation and some amount of hand-wringing by Cal fans, men's basketball coach Cuonzo Martin has been signed to an official contract.
Earlier this year in March, Athletic Director Mike Williams said that Martin had been working off his original offer sheet since coming over from Tennessee in April 2014. With the turmoil around this and the firing of assistant Yann Hufnagel, Coach Martin had been rumored to be a candidate for a handful of other head coaching positions around the country, but none of those rumors panned out.
Today, Williams sent out an email announcing the contract, which you can find here.
Williams had this to say in his email:
"On behalf of Cal Athletics, I am pleased to announce that we have agreed to a contract with Cuonzo Martin to continue to lead our men’s basketball program. Our head coach’s contract finalizes a binding term sheet that has been in place since April 2014 when he first joined the Cal staff. We are thrilled to move forward in this direction and are fully confident in Cuonzo’s ability to extend the success of men’s basketball at Cal and continue to build a championship program we can all be proud of.
Cuonzo is a tremendous educator and unparalleled leader who has helped redefine a culture of excellence here at Cal. Since he arrived on the University of California campus in 2014, Cuonzo has had a transformational influence on all of us. He has demonstrated that he is an educator, first and foremost, and cares deeply about developing young people into responsible and productive adults. Not only have we seen outstanding results on the court, his teams have also shown a deep commitment to their work in the classroom and we couldn’t be happier with the trajectory of the program. The team posted a perfect 1,000 Academic Progress Rate (APR) – the highest possible – for the 2014-15 academic year, and both Sam Singer and Stephen Domingo recently earned acceptance into the prestigious Haas School of Business as well as Pac-12 All-Academic honors."
Martin's deal is rumored to be for five years retroactive to the start of his time in Berkeley, so he will have three years remaining. The new contract is worth $1.64 million per year plus signing and retention bonuses. There are also several performance and academic based incentives in the contract, per a Cal spokesperson. Martin's record at Cal in two years is 41-26 (19-17).
