In Sitake, BYU believes it has a coach who can compete for championships — and much more

PROVO — Kalani Sitake arrived at a hastily assembled press conference heralding a fourth contract extension in the past four years wearing a hoodie and sweats, immediately removed from the practice turf inside the indoor practice facility.

Just as he'd like it.

The decade-long leader of the Cougars doesn't like to talk about himself, but for the previous three days, everybody was. That's when Sitake could have been on the verge of accepting a life-changing offer from Penn State, which is still looking for a coach to replace the fired James Franklin a month later.

The search in State College's Happy Valley will continue. But in the other Happy Valley — the one that starts at Point of the Mountain and extends through Spanish Fork and Salem — the search is long over.

Sitake reportedly turned down an offer of $11 million to be the next coach at Penn State. Details of his new deal with BYU are unconfirmed, but one source told KSL.com that the Cougars did not match what the Nittany Lions were willing to pay the veteran coach.

Instead, negotiations between the coach with a 22-3 record over the past two seasons, his representation and BYU athletic director Brian Santiago that extended through campus and to the university's board of trustees, including leaders from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were often about more than Sitake's own salary.

Make no mistake; the man who presided over back-to-back 11-win seasons for the first time since 2006-07 will be well cared for.

But so, too, will his assistants, support staff and players in his program in the new age of name, image and likeness and athlete revenue sharing. There were also discussions about facility upgrades and recruiting enhancements, Santiago noted.

Sitake's new contract, which stacks additional years onto last year's deal that would've kept him in Provo well beyond the previous extension through 2027, also calls for facility upgrades and efforts to keep BYU competitive with the top teams in the Big 12 — and nationally.

"He's committed to everything that's good," Santiago said of Sitake. "He's committed to not only running a first-class football program. He's committed to his staff, to everyone in the building; he cares about every single person that is part of this program. And maybe most importantly, he's all-in for his players.

"There weren't very many times in this process that he was talking about himself, about his own compensation. He was talking about wanting to take care of all the people around him. That's what tells you a lot about Kalani Sitake."

Questions as to why the discussions lingered for as long as they did can be saved for another day. Santiago made himself plenty definitive on this evening.

"There's nobody better for BYU football than Kalani Sitake," he declared.

In addition to being a football coach with an 83-44 career record at his alma mater who also happens to be the first Tongan-born head coach in Football Bowl Subdivision history, Sitake sees himself as a provider: for his wife, Timberly, for the couple's four children, for his father, Tomasi, whom everyone at BYU calls "Pops," and for family members who are related by every way but blood that Sitake is proud to help.

"I've been raised by a village," he said, "and hope I can make them proud."

That village includes his assistant coaches, staff and players, who should all see the benefits of his new deal. At the end of Tuesday's practice, Sitake gathered the team together to reveal, "I'm not going anywhere" — and elicited a thunderous celebration in the IPF that rivaled any in a victorious postgame locker room all season.

Sitake is a people person, which helps explain why prominent BYU figures including women's cross country coach Diljeet Taylor and former quarterback Gifford Nielsen (and current Latter-day Saint general authority) Gifford Nielsen; Utah Jazz and Mammoth owner Ryan Smith; Crumbl CEO Jason McGowan; and others stopped by his impromptu press conference.

Before the room was vacated and cleaned up, he stopped to shake each of their hands — as well as the two dozen or so members of the media assembled on campus.

But Sitake is more than a coach. He's also a mentor, an ecclesiastical leader (both officially and unofficially), and for many of his players, a father-figure.

"He embodies exactly what our university strives to be and strives to represent," said senior safety Tanner Wall, who added that Sitake "changed our lives" of him and his players. "He's perfectly aligned with that in all that he does.

"For some people, they might mistake that for things that aren't true; people think preaching 'love and learn' is weak in football. That's not the case; clearly it must be working, with the success we're having on the field and the way we're impacting communities near and far. It's working."

It's no secret that Sitake's extension was announced the same day that Texas Tech agreed to a seven-year extension with Joey McGuire that will add pay the former Texas high school football coach around $7 million per year. The twos ides are now linked, for Saturday's Big 12 championship game (10 a.m. MST, ABC), and beyond.

During a raucous coaching carousel that has already seen 13 new coaches fill coaching vacancies across the country, the top two programs in the Big 12 won't be among them.

But for BYU, the decision to retain Sitake was only partially about football.

"In many ways, Kalani Sitake is the public face of Brigham Young University," BYU vice president Keith Vorkink read in a letter written by BYU president Shane Reese, who was traveling during Sitake's announcement. "He leads out most prominent athletic team, and you couldn't ask for a better examplar of the Christ-centered values for which this university stands."

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