Virginia men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett, who led WSU to two NCAA Tournaments, announces retirement
From staff and wire reports
Virginia coach Tony Bennett – one of the winningest college basketball coaches in the history of the ACC and the sport at large, who delivered the program’s first and only national championship in 2019 – is retiring, the basketball program announced on social media Thursday afternoon.
Bennett’s retirement is effective immediately, and his final press conference will be Friday. The unexpected announcement, which did not include a reason for his retirement, comes just weeks before the Cavaliers’ season opener Nov. 6.
“That’s a huge loss for our profession,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few told The Field of 68 podcast at the West Coast Conference media event in Las Vegas on Thursday. “He’s as good a person as there is in any walk of life. An incredible coach and better person. Bottom line, I hope he’s at peace with it. There’s a lot more to life than basketball.”
The 55-year-old ends his career not just as Virginia‘s all-time wins leader, possessing a 364-136 record over 15 seasons in Charlottesville, but as one of the most storied coaches in ACC and college basketball history. A three-time National Coach of the Year – once at Washington State, and twice with the Cavaliers – Bennett is just the third coach in ACC history to lead his team to 10 consecutive seasons with a winning record in conference play, joining only Hall of Famers Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski.
During this tenure, Bennett flipped Virginia from an ACC afterthought to a national power, mostly predicated on the vaunted pack-line defense he learned from his father, Dick, who himself was a head coach for 28 seasons. The Cavaliers had rich basketball history before Bennett – namely during Ralph Sampson’s prime in the early 1980s, when Terry Holland led the Cavaliers to their first two Final Fours – but during his time leading the program, Bennett made the team into one of college hoops’ premier programs. From 2014 through 2023, Virginia won the ACC outright or tied for first place six different times, a stretch that included earning four No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament.
Of course, what Bennett is most famous – or infamous – for is the fact that his Cavaliers became the first No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 16 seed in the NCAA Tournament, when his top-ranked Cavaliers fell 74-54 to UMBC in 2018. (No. 1 Purdue, which lost to No. 16 Saint Peters in the 2022 NCAA Tournament, is the only other such instance.)
But the following season, with the core of that 2018 roster back, Bennett led Virginia on one of the most storied comebacks in the history of sports, when his Cavaliers overcame the memory of that loss to win the program’s first national championship in an 85-77 overtime win over Texas Tech.
Bennett went 433-169 overall in his 18-year career. At Virginia, he won ACC Coach of the Year four times. Bennett’s squads were known for their defensive prowess: his teams have ranked in the top five nationally in scoring defense 11 times. Virginia led the nation in scoring defense six times under Bennett.
Bennett arrived at Virginia in 2009 after leading Washington State to back-to-back NCAA Tournament berths – the only Cougar coach to accomplish that feat. Bennett took over WSU head-coaching duties from his father in 2006.
His 2006-07 Washington State team went 26-8 and earned a No. 3 NCAA seed before falling to Vanderbilt in the second round. A year later, the Cougars went 26-9 and advanced to the Sweet 16, falling to North Carolina.
His final team at WSU, which featured talented freshman Klay Thompson, missed the tournament.