The best way to process Tony Bennett’s sudden retirement as Virginia basketball coach is to offer an elaborate note of gratitude. Not a simple thank-you. That hardly would be sufficient. Tony Bennett has been too good to the game — and too good to the people in the game — to simply write a nice note on a 3x5 card and slap on a stamp.
Bennett was a head coach in the relatively ruthless world of NCAA Division I for nearly 20 years. If he made a single enemy during that time, that revelation would be massive news, and the other person probably is terrible, anyway.
“Tony Bennett embodies everything a high-quality coach should be,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said in a statement from the school, adding that Bennett earned “deep respect nationwide, not just as a basketball coach but as a person of great character and class.”
“College basketball just lost a man with incredible class, humility and dignity,” St. John’s coach Rick Pitino wrote on Twitter. “Tony Bennett is an awesome teacher of our game.”
“That's a huge loss for our profession. He's as good a person as there is in any walk of life,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few told the Field of 68. “An incredible coach and better person.”
Those are his competitors talking, the people who are paid to beat him for recruits and in basketball games. Bennett won 433 games, six ACC regular season titles, two ACC Tournament championships, and the 2019 NCAA Tournament. Perhaps no statistic could better define his excellence than this: Only three coaches in the 70-year history of the ACC went through at least 13 consecutive seasons with winning conference records, and their names are Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, and Tony Bennett.
Though it was not always embraced by fans of the opposition, Bennett coached the style of basketball he learned from his father, Dick, who won 481 games at Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Washington State. Dick believed in the pack-line defense and an offensive style in which skilled players were called “movers” and those assigned to screen for them were called “blockers.” It was not an approach that led to many fastbreak buckets. UVa ranked 330 th or lower in the “tempo” stat at KenPom.com for the past 14 straight seasons.
“What I’ve always been taught, and the way I look at it is, you better play in a way that gives you a chance to compete with the best,” Bennett said at the press conference to introduce him as Cavaliers coach back in 2009. “And if that system or style can’t do that, then you need to adjust.
“All I know is, Xs and Os aside, toughness and soundness need to be present.”
While it certainly is unusual for a coach to walk away from the sport at such a young age (55) and so close to the start of another college basketball season, the wrong way to process Bennett’s departure is to present another screed about the state of the sport — how awful it is that Name/Image/Likeness payments have become so impactful in the recruiting process, and how the immediate-eligibility transfer rule has granted too much leverage to athletes.
To catalog the retirements of legends Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, and Nick Saban and ascribe them to these changes may or may not be accurate, but it also falls into the category of gilding the argument. Coach K was 75 in his final season, Saban 72, and Williams 70. When might they have retired if the rules still were the same as in 1985?
It’s worth noting, as well, that the three exceptional coaches quoted at the start of this discussion are, on average, 70.
Let’s be at least a little honest about this.
The changes in college athletics have made coaching more demanding, more draining, more consuming — and, often, more exasperating — than at any point since James Naismith hung up a peach basket. The other changes in college athletics, though, the ones that almost never are discussed when these occasions arise, have made it almost preposterously rewarding.
The highest salary among college football coaches has exploded from the $3 million neighborhood in 2009 to Kirby Smart’s $13 million salary this season at Georgia. That’s a 333 percent increase in 15 years.
According to USA Today’s database, Bennett has earned more than $38 million over the past 13 seasons as UVa’s head coach, an average of nearly $3 million per year. At 55, he can decide no longer to expend the energy necessary to excel in the sport as it exists currently — and waiting around for the colleges to ascertain whether they can bring order to this circumstance might be just as exhausting.
Bennett has been a wonderful leader for his players, a phenomenal teacher of the game, and a marvelous example for everyone in sports to follow if they wish. Now, he can be whatever he wants. He can afford it.
That, as well, is a significant part of how college athletics has changed.
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