The Coach Who Said Enough.
He won't be the last
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There will be more curious scenes like the one that occurred Friday in Charlottesville, Va., in which a prime-of-his-career coach just up and quits. In this shaky era of college athletes not only getting paid but basing most of their decisions on how much pay and how soon, one of the inevitable fallouts will be coaches — and athletic departments, and university presidents — who either don’t understand the new world or don’t want to be a part of it.
The University of Virginia’s Tony Bennett falls pretty squarely into that latter category. It isn’t a matter of his not getting it; Bennett fully comprehends the system, and he has adjusted his recruiting to center around booster-fed name, image and likeness (NIL) money and transfer-portal talent.
But he also hates it, as Bennett openly acknowledged in resigning only a couple of weeks ahead of the 2024-25 NCAA basketball season. It’s not a system he wants to be a part of. He thinks he’s pretty bad at it, actually. And he believes that somebody else will be better.
"I'm no longer the best coach to lead this program in this current environment," Bennett said at a news conference. “There’s still a way to do it and hold to our values, but it’s complicated. And to admit honestly that I’m not equipped to do this is humbling.”
Tony Bennett is 55 years old. His program won a natty just five seasons ago and has captured two ACC titles since then. He’s 433-169 all time, a .719 winning percentage. He hasn’t had a team with a losing record in 15 years.
Not equipped to do this. His words.
When I say “shaky era” in the first paragraph above, understand that I’m not referring to athletes getting paid. That’s a done deal — and as we’ve often discussed here, it is simply an open compensation for services rendered, as opposed to the under-the-table payment model that top programs ran for decades. They keep records now.
But a free-for-all payment system with no real guardrails, rushed into place under threat of profound looming legal defeat, was always a stupid idea. We’re seeing some of that stupidity on display. It isn’t fatal, and it will almost certainly morph in the next decade-plus, although I couldn’t say for better or worse. (If you think universities want to take on thousands of new athlete “employees,” I assure you that you’re still drunk from last night.)
One thing that’s absolutely going to happen, though, is more coaches bailing out. The transfer portal alone will do in some of them, and for others, working at a school whose NIL money pool is too shallow will be a job-ender.
Then there will be coaches like Bennett. His grinding, defense-first style was never for everybody, and it’s certainly no way for an ambitious young athlete to get himself paid. But the killer — for Bennett — is that his program was always deeply reliant on having players who stayed, and learned, and got better, and wanted their team/school/crew to win. He won with third-year program guys, fourth-year guys.
That’s over. So is Bennett.
You don’t need to feel one way or another about this particular case to understand how the wind is blowing. By some accounts, Tony Bennett has already made about $40 million as a coach, so he was able to walk away from the multi-season contract extension that he signed only earlier this year. His is not a tragedy. His heart just wasn’t in it.
But I think more about the network, the larger system, and its implications. College coaches in the major-revenue sports are going to confront more hard realities about this open-payment and open-transfer gambit, and how it either does or does not work for them. And look, some big names will get out.
Nick Saban already left. Jim Harbaugh hightailed it out of Michigan and back to the NFL. (That might not have been totally about the new era). When Boston College’s Jeff Hafley quit to become a coordinator with the Green Bay Packers, it was clear that Hafley just wanted to coach ball. He didn’t want to lead the three-ring circus that is college athletics right now.
High school coaches, too, are going to be confronted with entirely different challenges, as kids — or their families — start pushing for systems and styles that lend themselves to getting players paid. Bigly. Right now. It’ll get rough.
"I think it's right for student-athletes to receive revenue. Please don't mistake me," Tony Bennett said on his way out the door. But, the coach added, "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.”
We’ll be doing this again, and soon.
This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as coaches leaving the game. I agree with Bennett in that players should be compensated, but as you said this is currently a very broken system - both NIL and the portal - that needs to be fixed and soon. College athletics has always been a "minor league system" for the NFL, NBA, even MLB. Now with the pay and portal college athletics has become an official mess of a minor league system.
Sadly, I don't care as much about the sport, nor its football cousin, when teams have the amount of turnover that NIL/transfer portal has brought. The association of certain players with certain schools was a meaningful component of my interest.