Big 12 coaches understand Bennett’s retirement

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — There are only six coaches left in men’s Division I basketball who know how it feels to raise a national championship trophy.

Two of them are in the Big 12.

That makes Bill Self of Kansas and Scott Drew of Baylor suited to opine on the state of the game, especially after they watched another title winner — Tony Bennett of Virginia – abruptly retire last week on the eve of the new season.

“In any profession there’s always going to be change. We’ve just had an enormous amount in the last couple of years,” said Drew, who captured his national title by beating Gonzaga inside the COVID-19 bubble NCAA tournament in 2021.

“I think human nature, we all prefer more certainty than uncertainty. You want to know what rules are, what to do and how to do your job, and I think that would be across the board in any profession. We’re still going through transition right now, and it’s probably going to take time for everything to settle, and you hate losing good coaches in the process.”

Drew and Bennett have been friends for decades, going back to long before either of them followed in the footsteps of their fathers by getting into coaching. Drew’s father, Homer, was coaching at Valparaiso in the late 1980s and ’90s at the same time that Bennett was playing for his own dad, Dick, at Green Bay.

The game is far different these days from what it was when Homer and Dick were on the sideline.

Far different from when their kids got into coaching.

Wave after wave of conference realignment has forced programs to cross multiple time zones for games, often more than once a week. The transfer portal has turned coaches into de facto general managers, forced to not only re-recruit their own players each season but often rebuild entire rosters with transfers and freshmen.

But perhaps most jarring has been the flood of name, image and likeness money that has turned high-profile college athletes into overnight millionaires, and turned recruiting into something akin to free agency in professional sports.

“The game and college athletics is not in a healthy spot,” the 55-year-old Bennett said last week, after announcing that he was stepping down less than three weeks before the start of the season. “There needs to be change. I think I was equipped to do the job here the old way. That’s who I am and that’s how it was.”

Jay Wright, who led Villanova to a pair of national championships, similarly retired two years ago, citing burnout among the reasons he abruptly stepped down at the age of 60. The rapidly shifting landscape of college sports hastened his exit one year after he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“I don’t disagree with what anybody has done or their reasons for doing it. I would say I don’t feel the exact same way they feel at this point in time,” Self said Wednesday. “I do feel like it’s a very uncertain world we’re living in right now from a college athletics standpoint, but I do think it will balance out. I don’t know exactly what the formula is, but I think we’ll look at our sport and college athletics a couple of years from now and it will balance out.”

In the meantime, there are plenty of coaches who view the shifting college landscape as an opportunity, where creativity and vision and work ethic — and yes, money — can allow struggling programs to turn around almost overnight.

“All these changes, we’re all facing it,” Kansas State‘s Jerome Tang said, “so you adapt or you get left (behind). For me, it’s a challenge every day. I have a staff that’s very creative, and they have young minds and bodies and they’re constantly pushing me.”

The Wildcats reached the Elite Eight in Tang’s debut season but backtracked last season, when poor shooting and inconsistent post play resulted in a Selection Sunday snub. In the old days, they might have needed years to overcome such a step back, but Tang leaned into the era of the transfer portal and NIL money to quickly remake his roster.

“I don’t get caught up in what is wrong,” Tang said, “but focus on what is right and take advantage of it.”