Congratulations to Tony Bennett for realizing that he was no longer up to the task of coaching the University of Virginia head basketball team.
Bennett, 55, won over 70 percent of his games at UVA, including the 2019 national championship. He conducted himself with professionalism and his reputation was impeccable. He has more than enough money to walk away and do what he wants.
What he doesn’t want to do, he said, is coach college ball in an environment where players are paid via name, image and likeness deals and are allowed, via the transfer portal, to transfer to any school they choose with immediate eligibility.
He isn’t opposed to the money, he said, but this isn’t what he signed up to do.
“I looked at myself and I realized I’m no longer the best coach to lead this program in this current environment,” Bennett said on Friday. “If you’re gonna do it, you’ve gotta be all-in. … The game and college athletics are not in a healthy spot. I think I was equipped to do the job the old way.”
Again, good for him, although his opinion of what is and isn’t “healthy” isn’t everyone else’s opinion.
The new era of the sport requires a different work level, different sensibilities and different relationships. There are more demands on head coaches (they are also paid a lot more to handle them). The players have more power and rights. The new system may not be perfect, but the old system had myriad issues too.
That’s OK. Bennett is gone. There will be no shortage of candidates eager to take that on and coach the Cavaliers, let alone for four or five million dollars a year.
And yet … in declaring that the transactional nature of modern college sports is just too much, Bennett just hit his own personal transfer portal on the eve of the season, leaving everyone high and dry.
In doing so, the players he recruited and retained at Virginia will enter the season without the head coach they expected to be playing for when they decided to be on the team. Instead, UVA will turn to one of Bennett’s assistant coaches (a side issue of its own).
Due to new NCAA rules, the Virginia players will be granted the opportunity to transfer immediately. But options are limited — if not impossible — just weeks before the start of the season and in the middle of an academic calendar.
They could also choose to redshirt and sit out the season and then transfer to a new place where they could play for the coach they expected, but that is a pretty strong burden on them as well.
In decrying the new problems with the sport, Bennett employed the old problems of the sport — almost all the power used to be in the hands of the coaches. They made decisions. Players had to live with them.
The National Letter of Intent was legally lopsided — it linked a player to a school but the school could still reject them. Coaches could limit what schools players transferred to; they’d sometimes block 30 or 40 options. Moving required sitting out a season.
Oh, and no one was legally able to get paid for their own fame, let alone the millions they brought into the school.
The old system was vehemently opposed to someone such as Caitlin Clark making a buck in a State Farm commercial or a player getting a share of a jersey sale, let alone boosters pooling money for de facto salaries.
The courts have ruled all of this illegal due to the pesky Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
Now things have shifted and for some coaches, it’s too much to bear. Again, that’s fine. There are other coaches who feel better about the job because they aren’t making millions off essentially unpaid labor.
Bennett was apparently troubled, but he was conducting business as usual. In June he signed a contract extension thru 2030. He brought in seven new players this offseason — two high school recruits and five transfers. All spring, summer and fall, everyone believed Bennett would be the coach.
Yes, players should always consider the school, not the basketball leadership, and no, being “forced” to attend at least one year at Virginia isn’t some prison sentence. It is still hypocritical to decry a system where players are allowed to make decisions on a whim while making a decision on a whim.
Quitting is quitting. And good or bad, for reasons reasonable or not, that’s what this was.
Couldn’t Bennett have done this in April or even late March at the conclusion of Virginia’s season? There is no perfect time for a coach to retire — Bennett rightly lamented the NCAA calendar, which is disorganized — but almost anytime is better than now.
Bennett isn’t the first coach to bail just before the season, perhaps in the hopes of getting his loyal assistant hired. Even the legendary Dean Smith did it at North Carolina in 1997. Smith was 66 at the time, though, and recruits were routinely asking if he’d be around for them.
Bennett’s retirement came out of nowhere, declaring the new system to be too much to deal with.
Now the players who believed in him are stuck with the consequences.
Old school defeated new school, at least on this day.
