Big 12 coaches understand Tony Bennett’s decision to retire as college hoops landscape changes

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

Two of them are in the Big 12 Conference.

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,” Drew said. “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…

Source link : https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/big-12-coaches-understand-tony-201821658.html

Author : The Canadian Press

Publish date : 2024-10-23 20:18:00

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