Congratulations to Tony Bennett for realizing he was no longer tasked with coaching the University of Virginia’s head basketball team.
Bennett, 55, won more than 70 percent of his matches at UVA, including the 2019 national championship. He conducted himself professionally and his reputation was impeccable. He has more than enough money to run away and do whatever he wants.
What he doesn’t want to do, he said, is coach college ball in an environment where players are paid through name, image and likeness deals and allowed to transfer through the transfer portal to any school they choose, with immediate eligibility.
He’s not against the money, he said, but this isn’t what he signed up for.
“I looked at myself and realized I am no longer the best coach to lead this program in this current environment,” Bennett said Friday. “If you’re going to do it, you have to go all in. … The game and college athletics are not in a healthy place. I think I was equipped to do the job the old way.
Again, good for him, although his opinion on what is and isn’t “healthy” isn’t everyone’s opinion.
The new era of sport requires a different level of work, different sensitivities and different relationships. There are more demands placed on head coaches (they also get paid a lot more to serve them). The players have more power and rights. The new system may not be perfect, but the old system also had numerous problems.
That’s okay. Bennett is gone. There will be no shortage of candidates eager to do that and coach the Cavaliers, let alone for four to five million dollars a year.
And yet…declaring that the transactional nature of modern college sports is just too much, Bennett simply entered his own personal transfer portal on the eve of the season, leaving everyone dry and dry.
In doing so, the players he recruited and retained at Virginia will enter the season without the head coach they expected to play for when they decided to make the team. Instead, UVA will turn to one of Bennett’s assistant coaches (a side issue in itself).
Due to new NCAA rules, Virginia players will have the opportunity to transfer immediately. But the 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’s also a pretty heavy burden for them.
In decrying the sport’s new problems, Bennett was tapping into the sport’s old problems; almost all 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 skewed: it paired a player with a school, but the school could still reject him. Coaches could limit which schools players transferred to; they sometimes blocked 30 or 40 options. Moving required sitting out a season.
Oh, and no one could legally get paid for their own fame, let alone the millions they brought to the school.
The old system strongly opposed someone like Caitlin Clark making money in a State Farm commercial or a player getting a cut of jersey sales, let alone boosters pooling money for actual salaries.
The courts have declared this all illegal due to the pesky Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
Now things have changed and for some coaches it is too much to bear. Again, that’s fine. There are other coaches who feel better about the job because they don’t make millions in essentially unpaid labor.
Bennett was apparently in trouble, but he went about his business as usual. In June he signed a contract extension until 2030. This season he brought in seven new players: two high school students and five transfers. All spring, summer and fall, everyone believed Bennett would be the coach.
Yes, players should always consider the school, not basketball officials, and no, being “forced” to attend Virginia for at least a year is not a prison sentence. It’s still hypocritical to decry a system that allows players to make decisions on a whim while making a decision on a whim.
To give up is to give up. And good or bad, for reasonable reasons or not, that was this.
Couldn’t Bennett have done this in April or even late March at the end of the Virginia season? There is no perfect time for a coach to retire — Bennett rightly lamented the NCAA calendar, which is disorganized — but almost any time is better than now.
Bennett is not the first coach to resign just before the season, perhaps in the hope that his loyal assistant will be hired. Even the legendary Dean Smith did it in North Carolina in 1997. However, Smith was 66 at the time, and recruits routinely asked if he would be there for them.
Bennett’s retirement came out of nowhere, stating that the new system was too much to handle.
Now the players who believed in him are dealing with the consequences.
The old school beat the new school, at least on this day.
