This story was part of our 2024-2025 season preview. If you’d like to view the full preview, please click here.
By: Abe Rothstein (@RothsteinAbe)
The news shook the sports world a few weeks ago as Virginia Head Coach Tony Bennett, aged 55, announced his retirement from coaching, only a few weeks before the beginning of the season. Announcing this move two weeks before the season was surely a shock for everybody in college basketball.
Assistant coach Ron Sanchez is taking over for Bennett who led UVA to a National Championship, won two AP Coach of the Year awards, two Naismith Coach of the Year, won 364 games, and ended his career with the highest winning percentage in program history.
Young coaches, like GW’s Chris Caputo, were shocked at the sudden retirement. Caputo considers Bennett a friend, and holds a great amount of respect for him, even calling him a ‘Hall of Fame coach’.
Overall, Caputo believes his departure from college basketball hurts the game.
“I do think college basketball really loses something when you lose someone of that quality, coach, person, the brand that he created there,” said Caputo. “It’s sort of unfortunate at that young age.”
Caputo considers himself a member of the Virginia coaching tree, as Miami Head Coach Jim Larrañaga was an Assistant Coach under former UVA coach Terry Holland, who famously retired at the age of 48.
In a similar circumstance to Bennett, Holland left Virginia after making two Final Fours and was the winningest coach in program history before Bennett broke his record in 2023.
“Virginia now has had two Hall of Fame level coaches leave early in their time,” said Caputo.
With the landscape of college basketball and the constant cycle college coaches now have with the transfer portal, Caputo understands Bennett’s move away from the sport.
He does not believe that NIL is playing a factor, but rather the lack of continuity in the NCAA rules and regulations.
“The rules have changed 10 times since I got the job. It’s very hard to be strategic when you don’t have any rules or what you think the rules might be like,” said Caputo.
With ever-changing rules, life and planning ahead have only become more challenging for today’s coaches. The Revs used the original transfer rule which stated that players who transferred once already must sit out a year if they wanted to transfer again. GW purposefully went after players such as Darren Buchanan, Garrett Johnson and Benny Schröder knowing that they would not be able to transfer again under those rules. These regulations were a large reason why the Revs had the fourth youngest team in the country and among the most minutes for freshmen per game.
“I don’t think being able to transfer without sitting out is good for the players. It actually might be good for the coaches at times, because you can turn your roster and flip your roster very quickly and they say that this is player empowerment,” said Caputo. “You know, not everything that’s that you’re empowered to do is good for you, right?”
Caputo believes that once the COVID year is up for many players, the overall graduation rates will drop. He thinks that players sitting out for a season allows them to get older, stronger and smarter which makes a big impact; just take a look at GW redshirting Christian Jones last season.
“I have a tremendous, tremendous amount of respect for [Bennett] as a person. Great, great, great coach, generationally great coach, Hall of Fame coach. It’s disappointing to me that somebody who’s relatively young…he’s about 10 years older than me, it’s disappointing that somebody who really should be doing this for another ten to 15 years, is leaving the game.”
Leave a Reply