Virginia at the Crossroads: Where do the Hoos go from here?

The present, and the future, of Virginia basketball was torn asunder on October 18th, thirteen days after the Blue-White scrimmage, when head coach Tony Bennett decided that he wasn’t up to the job of being an old-school head coach in the days of the open-portal, NIL regime. He resigned and left long-time assistant Ron Sanchez to pick up the pieces and try and salvage the season.

In short, the salvage job wasn’t particularly successful and Sanchez was notified shortly after Georgia Tech stomped Virginia in the ACC Tournament that he would not be retained as head coach. By terminating Sanchez now, I’m presuming that Virginia is pulling the plug on the rest of the season and will not be playing in the NIT. But the transfer portal, which waits for no man, opens on March 24th, so Virginia needs to have a coach in place to find the next generation of Hoos.

The Team

I am going to take Tony Bennett at his word that he simply didn’t have the time to reflect on this team, the new 24/7 recruiting process, or even the bag money, until he got a weekend away with his wife. I know what burnout looks like and you can be going through the motions without recognizing the burnout because you are so busy.

Tony Bennett was burnt out.

But…

He also did his friend, Ron Sanchez, no favors. Bennett had to have known that he left the cupboard bare, as it were. As absolutely everyone who has written about these Cavaliers has said, (hell, we’re no geniuses, everyone posting on Facebook or Twitter recognized the same) this team was shockingly unathletic. Anthony Robinson is going to grow into a beast in the post and Taine Murray has some surprising hops, but this team is not particularly fast, bouncy or even long.

Isaac McKneely and Andrew Rohde are learned defenders. Like all Virginia basketballers raised by Bennett, they shift their feet wonderfully and generally stay in front of their man without having to reach in. Sure, they can usually keep their guys from penetrating, but defense like that takes maximal effort and one reason the team experienced so many second-half swoons is that opponents on the perimeter had increasing success getting into the lane late in the game. It didn’t help that Elijah Gertrude, who does possess that kind of athleticism, seriously injured himself last spring, and was lost for the season. I suppose this will be the last time this season that I officially lament that there was no on-ball stopper like Reece Beekman.

In Blake Buchanan, Jacob Cofie, Elijah Saunders and Robinson, the Cavaliers had plenty of size for a college squad, but there wasn’t a rim protector in that quartet. The fundamental organizing principle of the Pack Line is that the perimeter players turn the attackers towards the interior help – hence the moniker Pack Line – as opposed to towards baseline. Yet there was no Ryan Dunn lurking in the paint to make shooters “hear footsteps.” Buchanan, Cofie and Saunders were all bullied in the post and could make journeymen like Eddie Lampkin of Syracuse and Georgia Tech’s Duncan Powell look like veritable world-beaters.

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Scoring has always been a challenge for Virginia since the national championship. Even the 2020/21 team, featuring Jay Huff, Sam Hauser and Trey Murphy, who have recorded 20, 30, and 40-point games in the NBA this season, only broke the 70-point barrier two times over their last 11 games. But the only reliable scorer this team had was McKneely. IMac averaged 14.5 ppg, which is good given the team’s pace of play, but in eight games this season, or fully a quarter of games played, McKneely was in single digits.

It clearly took the staff a while to figure out how to use Dai Dai Ames, and he certainly was in Sanchez’s doghouse for a while there, and he did show remarkable growth as the season progressed. He recorded double figure scoring in the ten games leading up to his unfortunate implosion against Georgia Tech, and that’s part of the problem. Over those 11 games, he was a reasonable three-point shooter (16/40, or 40%) but his main weapon was the long two. You know who has the best mid-range game in the ACC? Wake Forest’s Hunter Sallis. Whose team has lost five of their last eight and have probably been bounced out of March Madness. The mid-range two is a nice weapon to have, but to win in today’s game, it can’t be the second best shot in a team’s arsenal.

So, to summarize, mediocre team defense at best and middling team offense – except for those couple of games where Isaac McKneely can rain fire from deep – and that is the formula for a team that finished 9th in the ACC, or the exact mid-point of an 18-team league.

So, who goes and who stays?

Isaac McKneely has an elite skill, shooting 45% last year and 43% this year from deep. On a team that can credibly attack the rim, McKneely’s three-point productivity could produce a championship run. (For comparison, Kyle Guy shot 42% en route to the national title.) Unless McKneely really values a Virginia education, by all rights, he ought to move on. McKneely, after the Georgia Tech loss, did speak in glowing terms about this year’s experiences, however trying they might have been, and how much his teammates matter to him. Could be he means it, could be he’s a class act. I think he’s gone.

I can see Ames, Saunders, and even TJ Power leaving. Ames was seriously benched mid-season, so that has to color his thinking. Saunders simply isn’t a Power 4 athlete and ought to do much better in his career going back to the mid-major level. And Power? My heart bleeds for this young man, but having seen him at Duke and now this year, he isn’t a top 25 player and he’s not Power 4 caliber, either. He needs to go the mid-major route as well.

I think Andrew Rohde stays. Slower pace is in the Virginia DNA, and like London Perrantes before him, he is a slow and steady ball-handler. He wasn’t ready for prime time last year after moving up from some school called St Thomas, but as I documented previously, he put together a twelve-game run that was simply astounding. One wag said that Rohde had a good old-guy-at-the-Y game. He was right. When you excel at one area of the game, that can keep you at the Power 4 level.

Blake Buchanan has the hardest decision to make. He really needs to redshirt. He’s got grade A court vision and he’s pretty nimble, but he’s still far too weak to produce at the ACC level. He also needs to develop a shot other than his push-the-ball-off-his-hand abomination. (Blake, if you’re reading this, work on your hook shot, because what you’re doing ain’t working.) I was tracking the success of Blake’s “pusher” and I counted just two that he made (out of 40) before I quit because it was too depressing.

Anthony Robinson and Ishan Sharma? Both didn’t get off the bench vs Georgia Tech and both had decent moments in their freshman years. Pre NIL Wild West, I’d expect that they’d stay and they would have the kind of career Virginia fans would love, watching them grow into themselves over the years. Whether they stay will depend on the new coach. Same with Elijah Gertrude.

I expect Christian Bliss to be the first name to hit the portal on March 24th. Ron Sanchez spoke on his availability on two occasions, and it was basically word salad. Bliss could have played if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to burn a season of eligibility, which is player-speak for I’m gone.

The Season

If the old glass half-full, glass half-empty paradigm helped mark one as an optimist or pessimist, how one feels about the 2024/25 season would do much the same. Was this season an abject failure or did this team punch above its weight to secure a first-round bye in the ACC tournament?

Your mileage may vary.

Virginia entered the heart of ACC play with a 7 – 5 record. They had beaten the minnows, laid a gloriously deceptive shellacking on Villanova, but had gotten pummeled by everyone else. Losing to Rick Pitino’s St John's 80 – 55 was particularly galling. Virginia proceeded to lose five of six and we here at Virginia Cavaliers on SI were writing that UVa could miss the ACC tournament altogether. Losing to a particularly mediocre Notre Dame squad 74 – 59 in late January was the low point of the season for me.

And then, Virginia ramped it up. Ames got out of the dog house, Rohde settled down, and Anthony Robinson started coming off the bench when Saunders got hurt and missed a couple of games. The Hoos won five of seven before falling to Duke, but everyone lost to Duke this year. In a weak ACC, Virginia limped to the finish line winning just two of five games, but it was enough for the first-round bye.

This was a flawed team from the get-go. Bennett simply did not get good enough athletes to compete and the team had to pick up the pieces when Bennett left. I think first-round bye was the most this team was capable of, and thus the season was a success. If the team maximizes the potential it has, then that is all that I can ask. Ron Sanchez acted with as much dignity as is humanly possible when put in an impossible situation. He has served Virginia well.

The New Coach

Chris Graham of AFP made the case for a pro-sport GM model better than I could make, but suffice to say, I agree. It’s a new world, and we need a new model.

The home run hire would be Marquette’s Shaka Smart, who was successful at VCU, so he knows the Virginia landscape, and he’s proven to be equally successful at Marquette. But therein lies the problem; Marquette is tourney-bound and Virginia needs to fill this vacancy now. It has been reported that the search committee and Smart have talked, but I’m guessing it never got past the information stage. Besides, if Smart were to abandon his team on the eve of March Madness, he’s not the kind of coach I want at Virginia.

That, then, leaves Virginia to consider the up-and-comers. There’s a lot of advantages to this in that the search committee has had time, all season in fact. NC State and other major conference programs are looking to fill their head-coaching vacancies and they’ve known for significantly less time than Virginia.

Up-and-comers are like five star recruits: they could flame out at the next level, like our very own TJ Power, or they could succeed like Louisville’s Pat Kelsey (more on him in a moment.) You know, Tony Bennett was an up-and-comer, and one with “shady” past in that he got his start when his father gave him the job at Washington State.

Historically, Virginia is a mid-table ACC basketball program, reaching the heights only on the back of Ralph Sampson, a generational player, and Tony Bennett, a generational coach. Sure, we got Bryant Stith, but Maryland, another decidedly mid-table basketball program, got Lenny Bias.

What Virginia is looking for is the B+ hire, the guy who is not going to fall on his face like a Pete Gillen (who I thought was a great hire at the time, so what do I know) or a Dave Leitao. The name that seems to be generating the most interest is Ryan Odom, currently the head coach of VCU. Our own William Smythe profiled Odom here, but I’ll touch on the high points: his father, Dave, was an assistant to Terry Holland at the tail end of the Sampson era, before having a pretty successful stint at Wake Forest having recruited both Tim Duncan and Randolph Childress to Winston-Salem. While he was at Charlottesville, Ryan was famously a ball-boy for the team. And infamously, Ryan was the coach at UMBC. (I don’t really have to say any more, do I?) He’s taken three teams to the NCAAs and is ready for the big time. Bringing him to UVa closes so many narrative arcs that it would be almost criminal to pass on him.

I’m also reading that Richard Pitino of New Mexico and obviously the son of Rick Pitino has emerged as a serious candidate. Look, as sleazy as Rick Pitino is, that man knows how to coach and Virginia seems to like sons of coaches. Pitino coached at Minnesota for six years before getting his second chance at New Mexico.

Bucky McMillan (Samford) and Mark Byington (Vanderbilt) seem to get mentioned in every coaching availability piece and it seems they will get the chance to coach on a larger stage soon.

Which brings us back to Louisville’s Pat Kelsey, who is going to be the NCAA coach of the year. After winning a combined five ACC games in the Kenny Payne era, Kelsey has the Cardinals with 18 wins this year. And immediate success is due in large part to Kelsey bringing in 70% of Louisville’s scoring via the portal. There was an old adage about great programs not recruiting per se, but rather re-loading. Thanks to the portal, and money, any program can reload these days. There are multiple skill sets required to make a successful coach; it is safe to say that skill in the transfer portal was not one of Tony Bennett’s. Every fan base wants their shiny new coach to pull a Pat Kelsey. We won’t know til this time next year whether Virginia’ choice will be successful, but it is the skill I’d be most interested in if I were on the search committee.

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