There is an elephant in the room for Virginia men’s basketball. Some have whispered it during this 2024-25 season, in which the Cavaliers are a measly 8-7 and 1-3 in the ACC. Others have certainly thought it, but may have found it easier to place the blame of a lost season and a plummeting program elsewhere.
While there is plenty of blame to go around, the truth we all know is a lot of it should fall on Tony Bennett.
Bennett announced his sudden retirement Oct. 18, less than three weeks before Virginia’s season-opener. The timing was questionable at best, but many felt that he had earned the right to step away from the program at a time that was right for him.
And I understood where Bennett was coming from. If he wasn’t 100 percent bought in, he didn’t want to coach a team that was. He believed the program would be better off with someone else leading it, both this season and beyond.
Here’s the issue — he was wrong.
Bennett’s late retirement prevented Virginia from undergoing a national search for a replacement, meaning a coach from within the program was its best option. That worked out for Bennett, who essentially got to choose Virginia’s next head coach.
But it has not worked out for Virginia, squarely because Bennett’s succession plan was shortsighted — the team he built for his successor was flawed, and his assumption that the program could survive without its greatest-ever coach on such short notice was painfully optimistic.
Bennett handed the reins to Interim Coach Ron Sanchez, who, by all accounts, is a great person. His former colleagues at Charlotte, where he received his first head coaching gig in 2018, speak glowingly of him. He shares many of the same program values and coaching philosophies that Bennett brought to Virginia.
But it has only taken a couple of months — truly less than that — to see that Sanchez is in way over his head.
Across 15 seasons in Charlottesville, Bennett never lost seven of his first 15 games or three of his first four ACC games. He never lost back-to-back contests by 22 or more points and never lost an ACC opener. All four of those things have happened in the first two months of Sanchez’s time at the helm.
Under their new coach, the Cavaliers are ranked 66th nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency — they finished seventh last season — and hold the worst rebounding margin in the ACC. Virginia also has the fourth-worst turnover margin just one year after it led the conference.
If a team is careless with the ball, bad at rebounding and bad defensively, it is not well-coached. The Cavaliers check all those boxes. Sanchez is not a head coach of Power Four caliber, and the only reason he ended up as one is because Bennett gave Virginia no other choice.
It’s not just Bennett’s unexpected departure that has the Cavaliers reeling, though. Virginia’s former coach did not leave Sanchez much to work with on the roster.
For starters, Virginia doesn’t have a true point guard — at least not one that can run its offense. Florida State transfer Jalen Warley was expected to start at the point this year, but after Bennett retired, the senior transferred again to Gonzaga. Before they even took the floor, the Cavaliers lost a key piece of their rotation because of Bennett.
Sophomore guard Dai Dai Ames ended up manning that role to begin the season, but his minutes have dwindled in conference play. Sanchez indicated last week that turnover problems were the reason, but it seems more likely that Ames’ style of predominantly creating shots for himself isn’t a fit for Virginia’s offensive system, which asks its guards to do a lot of work off the ball.
In the frontcourt, sophomore forward TJ Power hasn’t done Sanchez any favors. The Duke transfer is shooting just 23.1 percent from the field and has arguably been worse on the defensive end. He started in Virginia’s first five games of the season but has since been moved to the bench, and he could soon be out of the rotation entirely.
Faulty recruiting had been a trend for Bennett in the years leading up to his retirement. The college basketball landscape shifted with the transfer portal and NIL, and he didn’t do a fantastic job of adjusting. His last few Virginia teams were some of his weakest — the Cavaliers didn’t win an NCAA Tournament game during Bennett’s final five seasons in charge.
But Virginia made the NCAA Tournament and contended for ACC titles in most of those seasons, because Bennett usually hit the ceiling with his teams. The difference this year, of course, is that he isn’t coaching the Cavaliers. Virginia is now getting the worst of both worlds — this is Bennett’s least talented team in a long time, and the guy in the center of the huddle is overwhelmed.
So there’s some blame to be given to Sanchez, for a failure to make this transition less than a complete disaster. And there’s some blame to be given to the players for the same reason.
But really, this is on Tony Bennett. He left Sanchez, his staff and his players high and dry. Regardless of the selflessness, honesty and intention that Bennett had in retiring in October, he has dug a hole for Virginia and thrown the program deep into it.
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