This is the second of a two-part deep dive Into UVa basketball and where things stand for the Hoos following the 10th anniversary of the home win over Syracuse that secure the ACC regular-season crown. You can read Part I here.
Taking a quick look at the immediate future: the 2024-25 roster is going to need some work. Reece Beekman, Jake Groves, and Jordan Minor are likely gone. That’s a lot of ball handling and scoring out the door. Technically Reece Beekman could return for another year, but there’s no indication that’s in the cards at this time. Ryan Dunn is an NBA Draft entry candidate, and while he’s pretty limited offensively, both he and Beekman leaving would be a big blow to the 24-25 team’s potential on defense. And of course, players could transfer out. There are several players that haven’t seen an uptick in role or might just not be a fit here. Everyone’s situation is different, but it would be very surprising if nobody goes in the portal, as that just rarely happens these days.
UVa brings in a pair of freshmen: forward Jacob Cofie and guard Ishan Sharma. Neither of them seem like sure bets to make a big impact right away, on top of the fact that freshmen rarely do at Virginia anyway. At this point, anything significant UVa gets from either of them next season would be a big bonus. Virginia does have two players redshirting: guard Christian Bliss and forward Anthony Robinson. Bliss will probably need to play next year, and perhaps a lot, depending on what Dante Harris choses to do, and what UVa does in the portal. Robinson is a bit of a project and how much UVa leans on him probably depends on how he compares to Cofie and what transfers Virginia brings into the fold.
UVa needs more offense from the portal in a major way, though. Isaac McKneely is a known commodity, and opponents are doing whatever they can to keep him contained (and it’s worked pretty well). Andrew Rohde hasn’t found his offensive game, so he needs to take a big step forward or Virginia will need to get scoring elsewhere. Dunn might be gone and if he’s not, he needs to work on his shot big time. Taine Murray is a known commodity and likely isn’t a starter while Leon Bond had some flashes early in the season but has been cut out of the rotation. Perhaps Elijah Gerturde takes a step forward too, but that remains to be seen; he certainly needs to improve his shooting, regardless. And Blake Buchanan seems to have potential to develop into a very solid post player, and UVa probably needs him to make a big leap from a role player to a primary scorer next season. Virginia could use transfer help at all three levels: ball handling, wing guard/forwards and a big man.
Beyond that, the Wahoos need to figure out what they’re capable of from an NIL standpoint and find a way to maximize that. They are on some promising players in the 2025 class and beyond, but we all know its a long way to the finish line. They have been in some very contested recruitments in recent years, but haven’t been able to close enough of them, and haven’t been able to fight off the blue bloods when they get involved. Few schools can do that successfully, of course, but finishing second instead of first in a few recruitments (Johnny Juzang, T.J. Power, Kon Knueppel, to name a few) makes a big difference.
Virginia could probably use a fresh perspective on offense, too. It seems that what the Cavaliers do when they don’t have a bunch of pros on the roster is relatively easy for opponents to defend. If they can’t improve their talent by a significant amount, and its possible that’s the case, then they might need to find different ways to score points. The defense probably doesn’t need to change much, or the pace of play.
There’s also the lingering question of whether UVa will even be in the ACC in 10 year’s time. How conference realignment, tournament expansion, and more impact UVa remains to be determined but it seems naive to think everything will be as it is now, in 2034.
As college basketball coaches go, at 54 Bennett isn’t old. And his health seems good, too. So the typical reasons you’d see for a coach to leave aren’t there.
But we have seen some coaches hang it up relatively early of late, and in college football, coaches have left for the NFL, citing changes to the sport and a desire to make their focus about coaching rather than all of the other things that go on around the game. Villanova’s Jay Wright recently retired at 60, and seemingly has no interest in returning. Bennett’s father, Dick, retired for the first time at age 57, then returned a few years later to coach Washington State and eventually hand the program off to his son.
This is a question that only one person can truly answer, but Bennett’s future at Virginia (and very possibly in basketball altogether) likely comes down to perspective on the current state of the game and how he wants to spend his time. Bennett has a national title and is probably a Hall of Famer at this point, so he may feel he has little left to prove, which is more than fair.
College basketball has changed a lot lately and Bennett can either go one of two directions:
First, he can look at the landscape and how hard it has been to get back to where they were and decide that he’s ready to hang it up and start the next phase of his life, or potentially take a few years off and come back somewhere else when he gets the itch.
Or second, he could look at the changes and double down on what the Wahoos do and how they want to run their program, a sentiment he’s expressed recently. Bennett is a principled person and its possible that he wants to keep pushing to get the program back to the top, to show that it can be down without compromising what you believe in.
Whether or not that’s something that he can do is a question none of us can answer right now.
But as we said in Part I: time tells us plenty that the moments cannot.
Either way, a decade is a long way to go. In the ACC, there are only four coaches left from that 2014 season: Bennett, Jim Larranaga, Brad Brownell and Leonard Hamilton. Louisville has gone through four head coaches and two interim coaches in that timeframe. If we were placing a wager, it seems more likely than not that Virginia will have a new head coach by the time this next decade is complete.
The question is when that does happen, what can UVa accomplish between now and then, and who takes over? Bennett has long-time assistants Jason Williford and Ron Sanchez on staff, the latter now having head coach experience under his belt. Or, if UVa decides to go outside the program, Bennett has built UVa into one of the nation’s best jobs, in a premiere conference, near talent and with good facilities and fan support. So they should be able to entice a good candidate.
What we do know is this: whenever Bennett hangs it up, the next guy (or lady, if it's Wahoo legend Dawn Staley for example) will have incredibly large shoes to fill, and Virginia fans will likely go from frustration at their current level to frustration that they can’t reach the consistent winning they saw with Bennett.
The next coach will almost surely do worse than the current one, as is typically the case with these kinds of things, but especially so here because Bennett set the bar so incredibly high and was so consistent in reaching it.
And that’s why, when comparing UVa’s results since 2019 to the 2014-19 level, a dropoff to simply decent seems dramatic. It’s fair to question whether the best is behind UVa in this era, but it’s also fair to think Bennett is probably the best coach to maximize what Virginia is capable of in the modern landscape and simply hope he’s able to find the right combination of players, coaches, and schemes to get back to the top.
