Tony Bennett was done

The Virginia men's basketball coach retired at 55 years old last week. His abrupt exit is just as much about him as the sport he's leaving behind

Every so often, there’s a piece of news that’s not entirely unexpected, but can still feel like a shock.

Earlier this week, we got one such example when Tony Bennett, the Virginia men’s basketball coach who led the program to a national championship in 2019, retired from his position.

Bennett’s departure isn’t a total surprise. Even for someone like myself who hasn’t been a day-to-day beat writer in two years, you’d hear from those around the industry that Bennett likely wasn’t to coach much longer.

Still, it was quite stunning.

At least some of that has to do with the timing. Bennett’s retirement came three weeks before the start of the upcoming season – which has deservedly garnered criticism – and four months after he signed a two-year contract extension through 2030.

Beyond that, the development itself isn’t exactly normal. A 55-year-old who has led his program to the NCAA Tournament in nine of the past 10 seasons in which it was held and whose team just one week earlier was picked to finish fifth in the 18-team ACC was stepping aside. It wasn’t because of a scandal or a serious health condition. He had simply decided it was time.

The possibility of such a move was more than just gossip within basketball circles. At ACC media days last week, ESPN’s Jeff Borzello asked Bennett why so many people seemed to believe that he could be the next college basketball coach to walk away from the sport. He didn’t exactly dismiss the premise of the question.

"I gotta call Jay Wright and see what he says, right?” Bennett said. “I always have said, when you're doing this, you're in this profession, whether you agree how it's going or not, you have to be true to yourself and really look at it and say, who am I? Can I operate how I want and can it be successful enough? And you get to choose if you wanna be a part of it or not. And when you feel it's time, like Jay did, like Coach K, maybe Saban, it's their choice. And you can sit here and complain and gripe. Or you have a decision to make. Either you try to do it in your way or you get to make that decision.”

Whatever came from that conversation must have been persuasive because a few days later, Bennett’s decision was made.

It marks the end of a career – at least for now – that has few peers in the history of college basketball.

A man who always had a youthful glow, even after most of his hair had turned gray, got his head-coaching start relatively early, taking over for his father, Dick, at Washington State when he was just 36 years old. He won big with the Cougars, going 69-33 in three seasons and giving him the best winning percentage for a coach in program history. Just how well did he do at Wazzu? From 1995-2023, the Cougars had just two NCAA Tournament appearances. Bennett was responsible for both of them, the second of which ended with a run to the Sweet 16. Given the difficulty of the job, it may be the most impressive thing on his resume – which is saying something for a man with a national championship.

His work there earned him the job at Virginia, where he inherited a different kind of challenge. The Cavaliers had been a regional and sometimes even national power for much of the 1980s and 1990s, but by the time Bennett arrived in Charlottesville, the program was mired in mediocrity, with just two NCAA Tournaments over the previous 10 years. Virginia is an academically prestigious school with a postcard-worthy campus that’s located in a state filled with athletic talent, but it regularly faced questions about the university’s admissions standards for incoming athletes and its broader commitment to winning in a league that required significant buy-in to be a year-after-year threat. In a conference dominated by Duke and North Carolina, Virginia was an afterthought.

That changed under Bennett. In his third season, the Cavaliers won 22 games and made the NCAA Tournament. By his fifth season, they won 30 games, won the ACC and earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in more than 30 years. That season marked the start of a new era, one in which Virginia rapidly evolved into a juggernaut. From 2013-19, the Cavaliers went 178-36, won the ACC four times, were a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament four times in six seasons and, of course, won the 2019 NCAA championship, doing so one year after it became the first No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 16 seed.

Bennett’s teams won with a style that was very much their own. They played at a glacially slow pace offensively, methodically bringing the ball up the court and seldom firing at the basket within the first 20 seconds of the shot clock. On the other end, their pack-line defense worked relentlessly (and often successfully) to prevent opposing teams from easy looks close to the basket. Everything that a team got against the Cavaliers was truly earned. In some ways, it was like watching a college football team that runs the triple option become a national power. Even for someone like myself who abhorred his teams aesthetically, it was difficult, if not impossible, to not respect what they managed to accomplish.

The system became synonymous with Virginia and was embraced by a fan base craving the kind of high-level success it brought. Its home games became a place where forcing a shot clock violation was met with the kind of raucous applause often reserved in other arenas for alley-oops or deep 3-pointers. For other programs, particularly those in the ACC, facing the Cavaliers was a jolt to the system. Preparing for them required a whole different approach and a whole different strategy.

Through that imposition of will, Bennett built a kingdom. He was one of the sport’s 20 highest-paid coaches, making more than $4 million. He had what felt like lifetime job security at a school that adored him and with which his understated personality seemed to mesh impossibly well. Even in what were widely regarded as down years, the Cavaliers managed to churn out at least 20 wins.

So why walk away from it?

For coaches, life-changing decisions can often come abruptly. It can be as simple as waking up one morning and just deciding your line of work no longer suits you.

As Bennett explained it at his retirement press conference Friday, it went something like that. He had originally thought of hanging up his whistle after last season, but the nature of the modern college basketball calendar immediately placed him and his staff in full-fledged roster-building mode. By June, he signed a contract extension. But while the university was on fall break and he went away with his wife for a brief vacation, his mind changed. He said that when he looked at himself in the mirror, he “realized I'm no longer the best coach to lead this program in this current environment.”

Bennett’s decision and the timing of it can be viewed through a more cynical lens. By stepping down three weeks before Virginia’s first game, he left the university with little choice but to promote one of his assistants on an interim basis and ensured players who might have otherwise had a wandering eye couldn’t transfer. If that assistant, Ron Sanchez, performs well enough with that group of players, he’ll have the inside track at earning the full-time job and carrying on Bennett’s legacy.

Bennett’s move also can’t be separated from his program’s declining fortunes. For all the Cavaliers accomplished for much of their outgoing coach’s tenure, they had undeniably fallen off a bit in recent years. 

After winning at least 30 games four times in six years from 2013-19, Virginia never won more than 25 games in any of his final five seasons. The overtime win over Texas Tech in the 2019 title game is still the program’s most recent NCAA Tournament victory. Without the future NBA players who were dotted across his 2018-19 roster, his style was no longer a model of ruthless efficiency, but an outdated approach that yielded painful-looking results. It’s both cruel and fitting that what ended up being his final game, a 67-42 loss to Colorado State in the 2024 NCAA Tournament, saw his team shoot 25 percent from the field and at one point go 11:23 without scoring a single point.

Much of Bennett’s explanation for his abrupt exit was tied to the current state of the sport, with liberalized name, image and likeness rules and players able to transfer without the penalty of sitting out a year fundamentally changing college basketball.

"I think it's right for student-athletes to receive revenue. Please don't mistake me," Bennett said. "The game and college athletics is not in a healthy spot. It's not. And there needs to be change, and it's not going to go back. I think I was equipped to do the job here the old way. That's who I am.”

Many who hinted that Bennett might retire unexpectedly early cited the stressors that the modern game put on him and his program as a reason why he could do something that was otherwise unthinkable. As it would often be framed, he wasn’t so much fed up as he was disillusioned.

In the days since news of Bennett’s retirement first broke, this is largely where the conversation around it has rested. 

To some, it’s an indictment of a sport that’s now ceded a disproportionate and misguided amount of power to petulant college-aged kids and those around them whose intentions aren’t always pure. That analysis can sometimes come across as scolding, like it did when Virginia athletic director Carla Williams spoke at Friday’s press conference.

“I think that when people like Tony Bennett exit men’s basketball, exit our industry for something that has nothing to do with coaching or teaching or being a role model, then shame on all of us,” she said.

For others, Bennett is the embodiment of the worst excesses of college basketball coaches, a whiny multi-millionaire who chose to give up his successful and extremely lucrative career rather than navigate a world that has the gall to allow players to cash in on the value they’ve created for themselves.

The truth, as it often is, is somewhere in between.

College basketball is a more just place than it was when Bennett was a star college basketball player, when he first got into coaching and as recently as when he won a national championship. The players who helped create generational wealth for coaches like Bennett are now able to claim a small fraction of that for themselves. 

But while that world is more equitable, it has also been more chaotic. Much of the blame for that rests at the feet of the NCAA and its member institutions, which refused to embark on any kind of proactive reform until the U.S. Supreme Court made it impossible for their heads to remain in the sand. Even now, their preferred course of action appears to be hoping Ted Cruz will take time away from his grueling schedule of recording three podcasts a week to draft some kind of federal law that addresses all of college sports’ most pressing questions.

Though it’s easy to identify the culprit in this mess, those college coaches like Bennett are the ones who have to live with the effects of it. A job that was always demanding is something more all-consuming now. The transfer portal is a dizzying, never-ending obsession, with coaches and their staffs monitoring it every few minutes of every day. Without contracts and collective bargaining, coaches are left to re-recruit their rosters after and even during every season. While schools work to catch up to the demands of an evolving market, they’re just as much general managers as they are coaches, which leaves them precious little time for the on-court instruction that lured them into the profession in the first place.

They’re paid extremely handsomely to endure it – as Don Draper would say, that’s what the money is for – but at a certain point, no paycheck or the opulent lifestyle it can create is worth a job with such a wildly unhealthy work-life balance.

Bennett, of course, is part of a larger trend.

In recent years, college basketball has seen many of its most decorated coaching luminaries leave the game. For many of them, the time had come and the sport’s shifting landscape was merely a final nudge to a destination that was about to be reached anyway. Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski were 70 and 75, respectively, when they stepped away. Jim Boeheim was 78 and, based on what Syracuse leadership said at the time, didn’t seem to have much of a choice in the matter.

Bennett’s case, though, is much closer to that of Jay Wright, who shocked the college basketball world in 2022 when he retired at 60 years old after showing no signs of slowing down, having just led Villanova to its third Final Four in the past six NCAA Tournaments. Wright wasn’t as forceful as Bennett about the state of the game prompting his seemingly sudden decision – he said at the time that it played a small role – but he and Bennett were both coaches in their primes who decided to quit rather than continue to oversee the successful programs they had built. It’s impossible for that not to raise at least some concern about the situation in which college basketball finds itself.

These jobs will always find takers. There’s too much money, prestige and fame that comes with them to remain vacant. But unless something changes, it’s fair to wonder about the quality of coach who will be willing to fill them, a question that could have a far-reaching impact on the entire American basketball developmental system.

Bennett, however, isn’t an entirely passive actor in this.

There are coaches who have been in the college game roughly as long as he has, if not longer, and who are still thriving. Dan Hurley, the coach of the two-time reigning NCAA champion and, like Bennett, the son of a coach, is only four years younger than the former Virginia boss. The man who Hurley beat for the second of those titles, Matt Painter, is a year younger than Bennett and has been a Division I head coach for even longer than Bennett but has nonetheless led his program to a 92-19 record the past three seasons. Bill Self, major college basketball’s most consistent winner of the past 20 years, is 61 and has been pacing a Division I sideline since 1993.

In reality, Bennett had a finely tuned system that worked under the circumstances of the time they were constructed. Once that changed, he didn’t win at the same rate and failed to fully adjust.

When Bennett offered up his rationale for retirement, he said as much, noting that he was “equipped to do the job the old way.”

There’s a scene in the fourth season of the HBO show “The Wire” in which one of the characters, Bodie Broadus, laments the state of the Baltimore drug trade and how business is conducted under the stranglehold of a new organization that ran things on that side of town. As he begins to angrily recount how things would have been handled in “the old days,” the man he’s talking to, Slim Charles, interrupts him.

“The thing about the old days…they the old days,” he says.

Ten episodes later, Bodie was shot dead, with a bullet hole in the back of his head and his lifeless face lying on the cold asphalt of a Baltimore street corner.

Bennett managed to escape such a gruesome fate, but the general principle behind Bodie’s demise holds true. Bennett was done with college basketball, but the sport may have been just as done with him.

(Photos: Imagn Images, Associated Press, Raleigh News & Observer)