One of the things I enjoyed most about the first half of my newspaper career was covering college basketball.
For two years in St. Louis and two years in Reno, I actually had the beat of covering a Division I team and traveling with those teams to road games. I covered the Missouri Tigers from 1984-86 and the Nevada Wolf Pack from 1988-90. I even got to cover the NCAA Final Fours in Lexington, Ky., and Dallas in 1985 and ’86.
In my first year working in California, I covered the UCLA Bruins, although only home games.
I had the honor of being a voter in the Associated Press top 25 poll twice — as a Colorado voter in 1987-88 and a California voter in 1990-91.
I mention these things as an introduction to a very sad post.
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I have been a sports fan since 1957, and if there is one thing worth saying about that it would be that following sports for that long means you will have both wonderful times and terrible ones.
When it comes to college basketball, the best moment happened 5 1/2 years ago when Virginia beat Texas Tech in overtime in Minneapolis to win the NCAA men’s basketball national championship.
Baseball is a sport that means much more to me, and the Washington Nationals winning the World Series that same year was wonderful, but Virginia basketball has been deeper in my heart for a lot longer. And even though the Wahoos have been one and done in three tournament visits since, I still look forward to their season more than anything else.
Until yesterday, when completely out of the blue, Virginia’s great coach, Tony Bennett, retired.
It was truly a shock. Great coaches don’t retire three weeks before the beginning of the season. That’s why I was convinced there must be a serious health problem with a member of his family.
If it wasn’t that, to me there was only one logical explanation, and that was what it turned out to be. I had been concerned for some months that changes in the game would make it much more difficult to compete.
The two biggest changes were changes in rules regarding transfers and in players being able to make big money while still in college. So-called NIL (name, image, likeness) payments meant student-athletes could be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
In other words, forget amateurism.
And Bennett saw himself as not suited to that new game.
“I was equipped to do the job the old way. That’s who I am,” he told a press conference. “But there needs to be change. It’s going to be closer to a professional model. There’s got to be collective bargaining. There’s got to be restrictions on a salary pool a team can spend. There has to be transfer regulation restrictions. There has to be some restrictions on the agent involvement on some of the young guys.”
This from a man who was named national coach of the year three times, a man who won more than 72 percent of his 500 games in 15 seasons at Virginia. A man who was under contract until 2030 and was making more than $4 million a year.
“I don’t think I’m equipped in this new way to coach, and it’s a disservice if you keep doing that,” Bennett said. “I’m very sure that this is the right step. I wish I could’ve gone longer. I really do. But it was time.”
In fact, losing one of the best coaches, one of the most ethical men, in the profession could quite possibly be a sign 0that major college sports actually affiliated with universities might be coming to an end.
It’s not just NIL or the transfer portal either. So many of the top high school prospects now seem to be staying in college just one year before moving on to the pros. Duke recruit Cooper Flagg, a 7-foot-2 center who is still in high school, is already being seen as a lock to be the No. 1 pick in next year’s NBA draft.
Bennett made a point of not pursuing the so-called “one and dones,” but that means the top level of talent is pout of your range. Much of his success at Virginia came from players who came in and learned, getting better and better as the years passed. Now players who aren’t happy at once go into the transfer portal.
It will be interesting to see what happens now. When a coach leaves, his players have 30 days to enter the transfer portal. I would hope players would at least stay put for this year and see what happens.
As for those of us who love Virginia basketball, this is heartbreaking, but there is one thing we can say.
We’ll always have 2019.