Virginia coach Tony Bennett — one of the winningest college basketball coaches in the history of the ACC and the sport at large, who delivered the program’s first and only national championship in 2019 — is retiring, the school announced Thursday afternoon.
Bennett’s retirement is effective immediately, and his final news conference will be Friday.
The 55-year-old ends his career not just as Virginia’s all-time wins leader, possessing a 364-136 record over 15 seasons in Charlottesville, but as one of the most storied coaches in ACC and college basketball history. A three-time National Coach of the Year — once at Washington State, and twice with the Cavaliers — Bennett is just the third coach in ACC history to lead his team to 10 consecutive seasons with a winning record in conference play, joining only Hall of Famers Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski.
BREAKING: Tony Bennett to announce his immediate retirement in a press conference on Friday at 11 a.m. pic.twitter.com/jw9HYtyYaq
— Virginia Men’s Basketball (@UVAMensHoops) October 17, 2024
During this tenure, Bennett flipped Virginia from an ACC afterthought to a national power, mostly predicated on the vaunted packline defense he learned from his father, Dick, who himself was a head coach for 28 seasons.
The Cavaliers had basketball history before Bennett — namely during Ralph Sampson’s prime in the early 1980’s, when Terry Holland led the Cavaliers to their first two Final Fours — but during his time leading the program, Bennett made the Hoos into one of college hoops’ premier programs.
From 2014 through 2023, UVa won the ACC outright or tied for first place six different times, a stretch that included earning four No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Virginia also won the ACC championship in 2014 and 2018, the first two times it had in the modern era.
Of course, what Bennett is most famous — or infamous — for is the fact that his Cavaliers became the first No. 1 seed to ever lose to a No. 16 seed in the NCAA Tournament, when his top-ranked Cavaliers fell 74-54 to UMBC in 2018. (No. 1 Purdue, which lost to No. 16 Saint Peters in the 2022 NCAA Tournament, is the only other such instance.)
But the following season, with the core of that 2018 roster back, Bennett led Virginia on one of the most storied comebacks in the history of sports, when his Cavaliers overcame the memory of that loss to win the program’s first national title, an 85-77 overtime win over Texas Tech.
That title in 2019 not only sealed Virginia as one of college basketball’s best stories, but it solidified Bennett as an all-time coaching legend.
Before that run, he was viewed as another excellent coach who couldn’t get it done in March; despite having won ACC Coach of the Year four times (joining Smith and Krzyzewski as the only men to do so), it took that postseason redemption for him to be considered an all-time college basketball winner.
With his retirement, only six remaining active coaches have won a national title: Dan Hurley (2), Rick Pitino (2), Bill Self (2), Tom Izzo, Scott Drew, and John Calipari.
In addition to his packline defense, Bennett’s tenure will be remembered for his player development, and the way he slow-cooked talent to create stardom.
He drew a few high-profile recruits to Charlottesville along the way — including four-stars like Kyle Guy, Mamadi Diakite, and Casey Morsell — but the majority of Bennett’s best players took several seasons to emerge as top college players.
Ty Jerome, DeAndre Hunter, and Malcolm Brogdon, among others, were all lower-ranked recruits who Bennett turned into not just bonafide studs, but legitimate NBA prospects.
But after the pandemic, when NIL was introduced to college sports and freedom of player movement hit new levels, Bennett’s long-term system was tested. One high-profile recruit Bennett invested heavily in, former wing Isaac Traudt, transferred to Creighton after redshirting his freshman year at Virginia; Bennett has admitted publicly he was taken aback by that move, which highlighted (or made clear) college sports’ continuing evolution.
Swimming upstream against that current, Bennett’s teams had struggled more lately than during his decade of excellence; UVa won the ACC regular season in 2021, but was bounced in the first round of the NCAA Tournament as a No. 4 seed by No. 13 Ohio.
The program then missed the NCAA Tournament altogether in 2022 — the first time it had under Bennett since 2013 — before being upset again in the first round in 2023, again as a No. 4 seed (this time to No. 13 Furman).
Last season, the Cavaliers bottomed out offensively, ranking 200th nationally in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency, its worst season-long ranking under Bennett (outside of the COVID-canceled 2020 campaign). And while Virginia did make the NCAA Tournament, it lost in the First Four to Colorado State, mustering only 42 points in the process.
There were rumors that Bennett was considering retirement late last season, but those were seemingly put to bed over the summer when he signed a contract extension through 2030.
Bennett then plunged further into the transfer portal than he ever had, signaling a possible modernization of his system; he added multiple starters, like T.J. Power (Duke), Elijah Saunders (San Diego State), Dai Dai Ames (Kansas State), and Jalen Warley (Florida State).
One scout who had been through Charlottesville this preseason — who spoke to The Athletic on the condition of anonymity, because they are not authorized to speak publicly about college players — said he was impressed with Virginia’s talent level and curious how Bennett would rebound after last season’s disappointment.
This story will be updated.
(Photo: Ryan M. Kelly / Getty Images)
