California Coach Mark Madsen sat there and stuttered. His answer had started with a resounding declaration, repeated twice for emphasis — “we are going to have great success here,” he said. But now he had run aground on a thorny sentence.
“And to start it off with a home win against a —”
Madsen paused. He looked into space, his mind sifting through possible answers. He was sitting in a room giving a press conference, moments after his team had polished off a 75-61 drubbing of Virginia Jan. 8. But what, exactly, did the win represent? What phrase could describe the program he had just beaten?
He tried to fill in the blank.
“ — you know, a — against a, you know — our first home —”
Against a great program? A conference contender? Just a decent team?
The trouble was simple. Intuitively, something about beating Virginia had triggered a swell of pride in Madsen, the Golden Bears’ second-year head coach. But when he had to articulate what, precisely, that was? He blanked.
So when Madsen, after a moment of casting around, completed his thought, he settled on this.
“Against a team from the old ACC.”
That is all he could summon. That Virginia once helped birth the conference, numbered among its early members. That it belonged to the old guard, the establishment.
Not that it was any good at basketball.
Virginia is still a program freighted with prestige, its recent greatness tinting the ACC’s complexion. It won a national title in 2019. It secured top-five NCAA Tournament seeds for six straight years before that. But recently it has not actually been a solid opponent.
That trip to the West Coast, including an 88-65 thumping by Stanford, came amidst an eventual five-game losing streak. That streak marked the nadir of the program’s only campaign under Ron Sanchez, which ended last week in a second-round ACC Tournament loss to No. 8 seed Georgia Tech. Sanchez’s dismissal became public a few hours later.
Virginia had not lost five games in a row since 2010. Other historic lows freckled the season. The 15-17 record marked the first time since 2010 finishing with a losing record. A December loss to SMU meant the first time since 2008 losing an ACC opener. Losses to Tennessee and St. John’s made it the first time since 2008 losing back-to-back games by 22 or more points. The list goes on.
That list started gaining bullet points early, after those losses in The Bahamas to the Volunteers and the Red Storm Nov. 21 and 22 by a combined 47 points. Virginia limped back from those blowouts and failed to squash rising concerns, submitting unconvincing non-conference performances against Manhattan and, later, Bethune-Cookman.
The conference slate brought further middling play. That five-game losing streak sent the Cavaliers tumbling into the conference dungeon, imperiling their spot in the ACC Tournament, a birthright which was suddenly in question. But Virginia recovered to finish 8-12 in the conference and snare the No. 9 seed.
There were high points, too, of course. A three-game win streak in early February mustered some momentum, with a dominant road win over tournament-hopeful Pittsburgh leading into a comfortable blowout of Georgia Tech — and then, in Blacksburg, a 73-70 triumph against Virginia Tech.
In the cozy and perhaps claustrophobic confines of Cassell Coliseum, against a big rival, Virginia controlled the game from the jump, then buckled in and gritted out the win.
Senior guard Taine Murray bloodied his nose at one point diving for a loose ball. Virginia fended off a furious late surge. In the hallway afterward, as maintenance crews laundered the stands and cheerleaders filtered off the court, junior guard Isaac McKneely talked about how great it felt to win in Blacksburg for the first time.
“You get up for games like these,” McKneely said.
It felt, perhaps, like something was turning, shifting. But then came five losses in the final seven games. And then the end.
The end puts the statistics, shifting all season, into focus. Virginia is presently ranked 104 on kenpom.com, its worst mark since 2009, the year before Bennett’s arrival. The most striking number there is its defensive efficiency ranking at 141. Even in the infant days of Bennett’s tenure, the Cavaliers never ranked worse than 71.
One thread, of course, ties all the streaks together, the ones that ended this year. They all started under Bennett — the national champion, the architect and foreman of a stubbornly idiosyncratic powerhouse.
Despite his sudden retirement Oct. 17, 2024, his tentacles remained rooted in the program this season. He had assembled the roster, then coached the players through the summer and preseason. The coaching staff belonged to him. The system and the style of play, too.
Bennett may have stopped coaching. But the Bennett era? It persisted, for one season at least. And at the center of it all was Sanchez, the handpicked successor.
Bennett and Sanchez are so similar, people who know both coaches have said. They spent 16 years on the same staff, first at Washington State and then at Virginia.
“First comes discipline, then comes freedom” was a Dick Bennett quote, then a Tony Bennett quote, and then a Ron Sanchez quote. Bennett and Sanchez grew up in the same tradition. Their careers are intertwined. They teach the same defense. They live by the same principles.
They share similar habits with the press, too — liable to sit down and preach, their monologues riveting most of the room and glazing the eyes of the jaded. They had the same tic, the same filler word. “You know,” they would both say. Not “um,” “like” or anything else. It was always “you know.”
The successor mirrored the predecessor in so many ways, but that was hardly reflected in the team. Virginia, though it tried, looked so unlike a Bennett team with that porous defense. But its last home game presented a fitting coda, a 60-57 rock fight against Florida State, the score locked at 28-27 at halftime. It all called back to the program’s early years.
Now, with Sanchez gone, there will be no more slowest-in-the-country tempo, no more of those idiosyncrasies that — good or bad, winning streak or losing skid — were always there. The hallmarks. The foundation. It all will change when a new coach arrives.
After that ACC Tournament loss to Georgia Tech, Sanchez and special assistant Kyle Guy sat in a back room in Charlotte’s Spectrum Center. The last time they sat there, back in Guy’s playing days, it was 2018 during the postseason. Virginia had just suffered the most resounding upset in the history of college basketball.
A year later, it won a national championship. Bennett and Guy have said that the national title run started with the loss to No. 16 seed UMBC. That the title, in a big way, started with that loss. Started, then, in that back room.
Seven years later, back in that same room, the Bennett era was three hours away from its official conclusion. The game ended at 2:08 p.m. The press conference wrapped around 2:47 p.m. The email reached the media at 5 p.m.
Virginia basketball was moving on from Sanchez, it said.
For the first time in 17 years, nobody knows for certain what comes next.
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