
Two-thirds of the way through, this historic men’s basketball season has been an avalanche of brutal disappointments. On October 17, a day that will live in infamy, Tony Bennett, UVA Basketball’s head coach for 15 seasons, shockingly announced his retirement. He cited the changing landscape of college basketball and the feeling that he wasn’t the man equipped for the emerging era. He had apparently reached the decision days earlier and informed his team minutes before the public found out.
The UVA community was gripped by uncertainty. The Hoos were to play their season opener in just twenty days without a head coach. Top recruits began to decommit and enter the transfer portal. Ron Sanchez, former UNC-Charlotte head coach and longtime UVA assistant coach alongside Bennett, was elevated to the position of interim head coach for the season. Virginia fans awaited the first tip-off of the season with bated breath. For the first time in a decade and a half, the Cavaliers would be coached by someone other than Tony Bennett, who had become a pillar, not just of the basketball program, but of the University and of Charlottesville as a whole. This season was destined to be a landmark, for better or for worse.
Three months later, the season has inarguably been a failure. The Hoos are ranked 13th in the ACC, and sport a losing record of 10-11, going 3-7 in the ACC. This is the first time since the pre-Bennett era that UVA has had a losing record at this point in the season. The Cavaliers also have not ended the season with a losing conference record since 2011, Bennett’s second year as head coach, and they haven’t finished under .500 overall since 2009, in the pre-CTB era.
The Hoos kicked off the season with a respectable streak of 3 wins against Campbell, Coppin State, and Villanova, but with smaller point margins, particularly against Campbell and Villanova, than a more competent team would’ve delivered. The team was handed their first losses of the season at the hands of Tennessee and St. John’s, both ranked teams, when they traveled to the Bahamas for the Baha Mar Hoops Championship tournament. By Christmas, the Cavaliers were 7-5, losing to several more ranked teams as well as conference opponent SMU. In a nail-biter, the Hoos eked out a win against NC State to usher in conference play proper, but, in the new year, went on to lose five straight ACC games. The Cavaliers did beat Boston College pretty handily, but then lost to Notre Dame later that week.
Virginia has been seriously struggling on offense. Outside of Isaac McKneely and Elijah Saunders, the team lacks consistent scorers. It is also missing a proper starting point guard—Andrew Rohde has had his flashes, but he has not been consistent enough to truly fill the role. Rebounds have also been wearing this team down. The Cavaliers get the fewest rebounds per game in the ACC, and have the second-worst rebound differential in the conference. After a tough loss against Louisville, star third-year Isaac McKneely said the team’s rebounding struggle is “not a talent thing, it’s just effort. Who wants it more and you know they wanted it more than us tonight.” On offense, this sloppiness leads to turnovers, and on defense, it has given UVA’s opponents an abundance of second and even third-chance points. By the metric of points-per-game, Virginia has the worst offense in the ACC by a wide margin, scoring only 62.8. The next lowest points-per-game in the conference belongs to Wake Forest with 69.4, almost 7 points more.
The Wahoo defense has remained about as solid as ever, but it alone is not enough to carry the flailing offense. Longtime colleagues, Ron Sanchez shares much of Bennett’s coaching philosophy, as well as his affinity for slow-paced packline defense. Out of every ACC defense, the Cavaliers have held their opponents to the second fewest points-per-game, behind only the Duke Blue Devils, and UVA’s defense is currently ranked 27th in the country. However, it’s hard to be a winning team when the Wahoos have been playing the way they have been on offense, no matter how good the defense has been.
On Wednesday, the Cavaliers finally snagged their first road win against the Miami Hurricanes, a team whose struggling season has been similarly accompanied by the departure of another great ACC coach, Jim Larrañaga. Like Bennett, Larrañaga unexpectedly announced his retirement early this season, citing his unsuitability for coaching college basketball in the NIL era. Larrañaga also spent much of his early career as an assistant coach at UVA, in the legendary era of Ralph Sampson and Terry Holland.
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