This season’s ACC Basketball Tipoff media day came with all the familiar trappings. There were the same pit stops on radio row. The same clamor of reporters. The same Coach Tony Bennett, up there at the podium dispensing wisdom.
Something was off about his words, though. They sounded different. Strange. Even alien. It was clear that some change had happened, to an unprecedented extent.
Take this response, from junior guard Isaac McKneely, in response to a query about offensive changes.
“We’re pushing in transition a little more,” McKneely said. “We’re trying different things. I think we have really good personnel this year, a lot of guys that can stretch the floor and shoot it.”
Pushing in transition, trying different things and stretching the floor? This sounds like anathema. Virginia is supposed to be stubbornly rooted in its style, resistant to change. Not anymore, it seems.
“You have to look at your model and adjust it a little bit,” Bennett said.
That is the admission, delivered matter-of-factly and without ceremony, that many have spent a decade waiting to hear. Some, fans and foes, have always derided the plodding pace and the commitment to developing lower-rated recruits over the course of three or four years.
But the wins kept coming, the program reached elite status, and along came a national title in 2019 — eternal validation. Things, though, have changed. Since the national title, Virginia has failed to win an NCAA Tournament game.
Last season, Bennett’s 15th at Virginia, invited serious introspection. Virginia doddered into a First Four game against Colorado State and then, in a stand-alone game, mustered 42 points. Bennett, after the game, fielded a question about his system.
“It’s stung to get to this point and not advance,” Bennett said. “So, of course, we’ve got to keep adding quality players. We’ve got to look at things, certainly, from a system standpoint. Absolutely.”
That comment kicked off speculation about the coach finally adapting his system. The rumblings grew as the offseason progressed, faint but intensifying whispers that something had, after all these years, actually changed.
The Blue-White Scrimmage Oct. 5 seemed to confirm it. The offense looked noticeably different — shots coming faster, guards initiating the offense earlier. But to hear it coming from the mouths of players and coaches is a different thing altogether.
“It’s been exciting,” senior guard Taine Murray said. “Changing pieces of the offense, but also being able to keep the foundation of the program is built on, especially around the defense, taking good shots and taking care of the ball.”
Some things, of course, never change. Defense still comes first. That fact will always be true for a Bennett-led team.
“You can expect a hard, gritty defensive team like we always are,” McKneely said. “But I think you’re gonna expect a different type of offense this year.”
More is changing than just the pace of play. Bennett has also adjusted his player development model, as a fusillade of changes to the college sports landscape has forced coaches to rethink the way they construct their rosters.
Bennett has always, in the way he recruits, been an oddity among the stewards of elite programs. Most, in the one-and-done model, target the highest-profile recruits and cobble together rosters that turn over every year.
Virginia has been different. Bennett has never won a five-star recruit out of high school. He favored a model of keeping players he believed in for four years, growing them over that time. Now he thinks differently.
“The way we’re thinking, with this team, [is in] two-year increments,” Bennett said. “You can’t say we’re going to build guys for three, four, five years.”
That is because of changes to the transfer portal. It is because of the advent of Name, Image and Likeness — which has turned college sports into what Bennett calls the “wild, wild West.”
Bennett knows players may flee for greener pastures. But he is hoping to preserve tents of his development model, shrinking it to two years while hitting the transfer portal.
“Of course, at the end of the year, could guys be disgruntled? Could a guy or two leave?” Bennett said. “Perhaps. But if you can keep a core together for at least two years and look at it that way, and then they develop.”
The whole vista is changing. So is Virginia. It remains to be seen how well the changes will work out in reality, but for now, even just as words at a media event a few weeks before the season, they herald a new era.
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