The Michigan Wolverines‘ head coaching search has seen Arizona State’s Kenny Dillingham tabbed as one of the leading candidates for the job. However, the school and head coach have been working diligently on a contract extension that keeps the ASU alum at home with the resources he needs to compete.

With the Michigan head coaching search potentially heating up, or at least gaining some clarity this weekend, ASU athletic director Graham Rossini addressed the contract extension status on Friday.

 ”I know there’s a lot going on around the valley, around our fan base,” Rossini told The Burns and Gambo show. “I’m hearing about it as well. I’m not gonna talk about contracts publicly. That’s just not the way that I played the situations out, but I’m happy to talk about the leadership in our program. And I’m of the many thousands of people who also agree that Kenny Dillingham is the right leader for our football program.

“Leadership Matters. We have tremendous leadership in place with the coach and his staff, and so we’re working through it. We’re working through some details and it’s an exciting moment for our program. There are a lot of things that we want to solidify. And I think just looking at the perspective of how we look at these things as a sport, as an industry, we work with these long-term contracts, the reality is the landscape of college sports is changing daily, weekly, very quickly. And so my perspective has been all along is that as you’re designing something long-term, the little details become the most important part of the big moments. And so we’ve got to get it right. We’ve got to secure what we’ve been building.

“I’m about the mindset that it’s more important to get it right than it is to get it done. And that doesn’t mean that we’re recklessly slow or we’re irresponsible, but we’re committed to getting it right. And so I also understand the world that we live in, and I understand it’s a great item of discussion and debate and topic and anxiety for people. But I would hope people also understand that there’s a privacy and a process that plays out behind the scenes. And so I know everybody wants to scoop. I know people want these things to play out on social media but that’s not how these processes evolve, and so I just hope the fan base is sensing that there is a really good track record recently that reflects confidence in how we’re approaching athletics.

“We retained coaching staff in football last season proactively. We’ve continued to invest resources in our program. We’re continuing to make significant progress on the football facility. We’ve got some fun news on that project that you’ll hear more about in January, and so we’re hard at work. We’re hard at work doing all of it, but again, from my perspective, when you’re going through long-term commitments and arrangements, every little detail needs to be right, and we’re focused on making sure that all those details can be as right as possible.”

Earlier this week, Dillingham was asked to calm the panic in Tempe over his potential candidacy at Michigan, but he did not exactly provide it.

“I think my job is to try to do whatever I can for the people that are with me,” Dillingham said Tuesday. “The people that are in the foxhole, the coaches that are in the foxhole with me. I’ve got to do whatever I can to fight for those people, for my family, for everything from that perspective. I love it here. I’ve said that since day one. That’s absolutely never changing. Absolutely never changing. So, yeah. That piece is never changing.”

Dillingham, 35, is one of the youngest coaches in FBS and is seen as an up-and-comer in the profession. He holds a 22-16 record in three years at Arizona State, but has gone 19-7 over the last two seasons, including a Big-12 Championship in 2024 and a trip to the College Football Playoff, where ASU lost to Texas in the quarterfinals in overtime. The Sun Devils coach was set to earn a total of $7,442,000 in 2025, not including bonuses, which ranks No. 2 in the Big 12 Conference per USA Today.

Michigan fired head coach Sherrone Moore with cause on Dec. 10 after the discovery of an inappropriate relationship with a staffer. He went 17-8 in two seasons on the job.