Virginia’s Tony Bennett digs deeper after retirement news conference: ‘I felt I was the one holding them back’

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Tony Bennett does not handle attention all that comfortably. He’s never one to seek a spotlight and, to my mind, has never called a member of the press in search of credit or to suss out a buzzy behind-the-scenes rumor. Bennett, sometimes to the frustration of the media, is often humble to a fault. Predictably, that humility was on display again Friday, perhaps for one last time. 

“The University of Virginia is an amazing place because of people like Tony,” athletic director Carla Williams said during her introduction of Bennett’s retirement press conference. 

As Williams’ opening remarks led into a standing ovation for Bennett, the coach predictably donned a sheepish grin, his shoulders slouched as he channeled the energy of a child who doesn’t know what to do with their body when everybody is singing the happy birthday song to them. If they’d have let Bennett retire without nothing more than a paragraph’s worth of a press release, he probably would have taken it. 

What a surreal scene it was, though. One of the game’s greatest coaches is walking away, on this odd day of the 18th of October, nearly on the eve of the season, becoming the latest high-profile coach to pull the ripcord. And in doing so, Bennett puts that much more attention on the unstable environment of college athletics that has a lot of people soul-seeking and scrambling for solutions to existential problems that go a hell of a lot deeper than one man’s decision to no longer coach basketball. 

“I thought it would be a little longer, to be honest, but it’s been on loan and it’s time for me to give it back,” Bennett said as he held back tears. The scene raised the question of why a 55-year-old was stepping away like this, 18 days before the start of the 2024-25 season, and Bennett provided answers. 

After his news conference, he took even more questions in a one-on-one interview with CBS Sports, getting into the specifics of his exit.

“Until there’s parameters, I know I can’t do it, and that’s the whole deal here,” he told CBS Sports. “I think sometimes you almost talk yourself into things as you’re doing it. Like, I can do this. I am equipped. We can adjust. And you kind of tell yourself certain stuff and you start believing. Yep, I can. But when you kind of step back and look. Can I be as effective as I need to be? Am I fully aligned with how it has to be for this university, for these young men? Can I give everything, can we build a program in this way, or is it, is my way more designed for the old model?”

But before digging into the massive shifts in the college basketball landscape that have pushed out other legendary coaches as well, you need to go back to how Bennett’s unplanned voyage began. Before the 433 wins and the ultimate redemption of that Homeric 2019 national championship. Before the eight combined ACC titles, the national coach of the year awards and the more-than-you-realized number of NBA picks he developed in Charlottesville. 

All of Bennett’s success and ACC domination over the past decade has obscured the fact that, for much of the first half of his life, he was not keen on coaching. Initially, he resisted it. He easily could have never chosen this path. Bennett saw and learned from — and was sometimes bewildered by — the life and vocation his father took. The incandescent Dick Bennett won 489 games of his own across three decades. He is a legend in his own right, but his competitiveness tortured him. In 1999, standing on the doorstep of 30 with his playing days behind him, Tony tiptoed toward the coaching sideline the only way he knew how: by offering himself as a servant for others. More than that: He primarily did it as a favor to his father. Dick knew having Tony on his staff was the only way he could spend more time with his son. So, a Hall of Fame-worthy career began as a volunteer assistant for the Wisconsin Badgers.

If Dick doesn’t ask Tony to give it a try, college basketball and the University of Virginia’s program are a lot different because of it. 

Tony was quickly promoted to an assistant’s post, a spot he quietly held for seven years, first at Wisconsin and then at Washington State, until Dick retired following the 2005-06 season. Tony took over in the dim and distant outpost of Pullman, Washington, and proceeded to practically break the laws of basketball physics by winning 69 games in his first three seasons and guiding the Cougars to their only back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances in school history. After doing the near-unthinkable with Wazzu, he was the clear choice nearly 2,500 miles away at Virginia in 2009, when former athletic director Craig Littlepage made the hire that would consequently alter college basketball for the next 10-plus years. 

Virginia the best of what’s around under Bennett  

Less than three weeks after Bennett got the job in 2009, he was in John Paul Jones Arena — where the team’s offices are — working late on the weekend. Hometown heroes Dave Matthews Band were back in town and playing a couple of shows that night. As it got closer to showtime, Bennett pulled back one of the curtains to peek on the scene. The place was sold out. JPJ Arena wasn’t even three years old at that point, and ‘Hoos hoops wasn’t pulling in crowds like these. Not even close. As he took in the view, Bennett felt a jolt.

“I remember thinking, man, someday if we can build this program, it’s going to look like this for basketball games,” Bennett said Friday.

Bennett’s band would indeed break through. By 2014, he’d won his first ACC title. Soon enough, he was filling JPJ just like DMB.   

Under Bennett, Virginia experienced its most sustained success in school history. He stubbornly cut against the grain of tactical trends and new-age Xs-and-Os. His teams didn’t so much play in the mud as they lived in it, regularly logging last in adjusted tempo at KenPom.com. 

“We did it in a unique way,” Bennett said. “That was my vision, our vision as a staff. Can we build this program that maybe is a little different than the way you do it? That’s the beauty of this sport. You get to choose how you do it, with who you do it, in the style you do it.”

“Embrace the Pace” became a cheeky mantra for the program, buoyed by Bennett’s signature pack-line defense. Virginia was a scouting nightmare to scheme against. Even if Bennett’s teams didn’t win every time, his pace would. There was no speeding up against Wahoos. He was criticized for the cosmetics but the results were undeniable. Bennett won 70% of his ACC games, his success over Duke and North Carolina unmatched by any other program in the conference during his tenure. He’s one of the greatest coaches in ACC history. 

The 74-54 flameout vs. UMBC in the first round of the 2018 NCAAs marked a historic blast. Never before had a No. 16 seed toppled a No. 1. (Virginia was, in fact, the No. 1 overall seed in that tournament.) Bennett, drawing on his father’s instincts, refused to abandon his principles. Putting his trust in his faith, he believed he was supposed to experience such humiliation in order to find higher ground. One year later, the Cavaliers rebounded to maximum reclamation and hit the mountaintop by winning the national title, doing so with one of the most dramatic runs of close-call games in NCAA history. They may well play college basketball for a millennium to come on this planet, and still the human race might not see a year-over-year redemption story like it again. 

That was the high point. Now, the sober reality. 

In the past year, Bennett said, his assistants effectively had to continue to pull him closer to the new model, the new way of college coaching. He gave retirement serious thought in the days following Virginia’s 67-42 loss to Colorado State in the First Four — I can now share that Bennett talked about this with me off the record in April — but before he could really allow himself to push through on that, recruiting in the portal pulled him into the next phase of the job, and then the next. He didn’t want to be pulled any more. 

This week, he broke free. 

Bennett could have had another decade of good-to-great coaching in him if he felt it. But that feeling sapped from him in recent months, and in just the past week, the epiphany hit. With three days to get away, Tony and his wife, Laurel, headed out of town to Tides Inn, on the Rappahannock River. Over the course of 48 hours, he faced his truth. He said it hit him in a way that was inescapable.

“We lost a lot of players that I think we wouldn’t have lost [before NIL regulations],” Bennett said. “And that’s OK because it’s a new model. And so you’ve got to decide, where’s the line, how far can we go? … It’s confusing. I’ll be honest, it’s confusing.

“I realized if we can’t have the right players to compete, the gap could grow,” Bennett added. “I felt I was the one holding them back.” 

Bennett called Williams to deliver the news Tuesday. She asked him to sleep on it and decide for sure after going through Wednesday’s practice. Bennett told me he went into that practice open-minded and willing to maybe double-back on his decision, just in case he needed to be nudged back onto his course. 

“In practice, I tried,” he said. “I felt the things that would probably take some of my ability to communicate with them and the joy that’s needed for them to play along with the intensity and the purpose. I felt that, even in that practice, when I knew probably what I was doing and it was almost confirmed.”

One of Bennett’s favorite quotes, for decades, purportedly comes from a missionary named Jim Elliott, who said: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Bennett used the quote in his press conference on Friday.

The thing he cannot lose is what he finds himself wanting most now: time with his family, time spent on those closest with him, time not wasted by worrying every day about the state of a basketball roster, how much a player in the transfer portal will cost, how much money Virginia has to raise to make sure it doesn’t fall a tier or two down in the hierarchy of the ACC. Those things have picked and peeled away at a job that is very much not what it was in 2019, let alone in 2009.

“Now that I’m not in it, I can say this. It’s too much,” Bennett told me. “You go from the moment the season ends, you’re trying to fill your roster and you’re in there and you gotta go, go, go. You gotta be on campus. And the season’s long enough, whether you are in the tournament, the moment it ends you’re right away trying to rebuild your roster, and you’re in there, and it was two months of insane work. You’re just going, going, going.”

For as pure as Bennett’s reputation is as a coach, a father and a man, the timing of it has understandably come under some criticism. After Bennett went so far as to attend ACC Tipoff a week ago to meet with the media, the move comes off as calculated. To go up and quit on the program while overseeing a team peppered with unproven players was to put Virginia in a very tight spot. And in doing so, it forced the hand of Williams, who tapped longtime Bennett lieutenant Ron Sanchez as interim head coach for the season. 

Decision to retire couldn’t wait

I asked Bennett about why retiring now was appropriate. The offseason is over. The time coaches cherish the most — the actual games — is upon us. He could have privately decided to retire come March 2025 and kept to himself. 

“It wasn’t like I got this set and I planned this date,” Bennett said. “If you’re battling things and you’re not all in and have the passion to give. You have to know who you are, and you have to be all in with everything. If you know you’re fighting yourself in this — because you’re still recruiting, you’re still involved with stuff — you’re gonna have to keep building, and you’re always worrying about what’s next. And I felt, even in the fall, I felt things I haven’t felt for a long time, or maybe I’ve been battling and coaching some of my perspective. Sometimes, you know, my anger — and people say, ‘Oh, you don’t get angry’ — but I felt myself becoming a little more transactional in mindset. At times. And then I’d catch myself, but I felt that battle being waged inside, and I never want to be like that. That’s why I’m not equipped for this.” 

It’s fair to criticize the timing of the move, but not the reasons behind it. Bennett isn’t dismissing the skeptics, but to hear him on Friday was to hear a man comfortable in his truth and confident in the next phase of Virginia’s program. If he wasn’t, he would have likely pushed through for one final season. 

Bennett signed a contract in June, tricking himself into thinking he was ready. But the regulations and guardrails he hopes come to the sport for the stability of everyone involved were never in the near-future. College sports is evolving at a pace that is pushing championship-winning coaches out of the profession. First it was Roy Williams in 2021. Then Mike Krzyzewski and Jay Wright in 2022. But Bennett is 55, easily the youngest of them all. A guy who never initially wanted to get into coaching found himself looking around and wondering what profession he was in. It certainly wasn’t the one he volunteered for in Madison 25 years ago.

“When you have that battle, if you’re not all in and locked … I didn’t want to have the regret of being 80% of what I could be. Because it’s a fine line here,” Bennett said. “We don’t have all the things the others have in terms of five-stars — we’ve got good players — but it’s a way that you have to build them. If I’m 70%, 80%, that’s not fair to the players. You know what? This staff, they’re the ones that are thinking they can handle this model better than I can. And until it changes, no one will be able to handle it fully, but that’s what led to it at this time.

“You do have to be all in, and I don’t know exactly what that looks like,” he said. “There’s good things about this new stuff. I mentioned that [in my press conference], and I mean it. But there’s a lot that’s not healthy and not good, and it’s spinning out of control. There has to be change.”

He’s going to lobby for a true shutdown period in the offseason — if not two — where coaches are mandated to not have any contact with recruits, to enable more balance. Without it, he knows more accelerated retirements are guaranteed in the next few years. He wants to be an agent for positive developments in college athletics. Taking into account the money that’s now flowing across high-profile college sports, Bennett sees a major mental health crisis coming for college athletes if more protections aren’t put around them ASAP. 

For as much as he has concern there, he also wants to give himself to his family more than he ever has — wife, children and parents. Dick and Anne Bennett are 81 years old. He’s only gotten to see them once or twice a year in recent years. I remember Bennett calling me on an August morning in 2023 for our Candid Coaches series as he sipped coffee outside next to his mother. He was as chatty then as I’ve ever heard him. 

“I don’t want to live with regrets,” he said Friday. 

And so, this seems to be it. I asked if he was retired for good from all of basketball coaching, not just college. 

“Right now, I think it’s done,” Bennett said. “I need a break. That was even something Carla talked about. Maybe you need a sabbatical, or something like that. But in this landscape, I don’t foresee myself getting back. I really don’t. That wasn’t the intention at all of this, to just get a break. I think you know when it’s your time, and I hope I can impact in whatever way it is, whether it’s around the game in different ways, or something else, that’s too soon to know.”

Laurel Bennett told me the one stipulation of this decision was that there were no more big decisions coming soon thereafter. No plans for next week, next month, next year. 

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

As for his role around the team, don’t expect him to pop up at a lot of games in the season ahead. Bennett said he doesn’t plan on being a constant public presence around official Virginia basketball events; he knows he needs to provide some distance to best help the transition process.

“This was never mine, and it was time to give it back,” Bennett said. “And that’s the peace that I have.”

About an hour after he told me those words, after the Bennetts quietly made their way off campus to go enjoy a truly stress-free weekend and entered the next stage of their lives, the sounds of the inevitable season manifested as they do. A bouncing basketball could be heard inside John Paul Jones Arena from one of the players who was out early to get up shots. The video board displayed a graphic with multiple images of the greatest coach in Virginia basketball history, complete with championship trophies at his feet. It read: “THANK YOU COACH TONY BENNETT.”

One by one, more and more, they all popped into the arena. Players, coaches, managers. Most of them were there because of one man: Tony Bennett. Practice was soon to begin. The music over the PA speakers got louder. Shortly before 2 p.m., Sanchez walked out, a folded practice plan in his left hand. Indiana Pacers coach/Virginia alum Rick Carlisle spoke to the team in a circle at mid-court.

At 2 p.m., the video board flickered. The graphic with Bennett’s pictures swapped, replaced by what’s almost always there as default: a logo for Virginia basketball.

In Charlottesville, a new era begins. And in that moment, the reality hit hard in more ways than one.

Tony Bennett has left the arena.