Tony Bennett screws WSU, heads to Virginia
Congratulations to former Washington State basketball coach Tony Bennett for providing our WTF Moment of the Year. After years of deceiving everyone with his “I love Pullman” talk, Bennett just royally betrayed all of Cougar nation by bolting for the head coaching vacancy at the University of Virginia. I know. I completely forgot that UVA existed, too.
To call this move a head-scratcher would be a complete understatement. First off, Bennett has a pretty good thing going at WSU, where the expectations are low, and he can mask his coaching and recruiting deficiencies by playing hard-nosed defense and flying under the radar. Not so at Virginia, where the unassuming Wisconsin boy will be thrust into the spotlight and expected to turn a completely irrelevant Cavalier program into a contending force in the ACC.
Remember Gordon Bombay? He was the reckless coach of the peewee hockey team in Disney’s Mighty Ducks trilogy, a one-time lawyer sentenced to community service that found himself through hanging out with teenagers. A wild-and-crazy hotshot who settles into the role of mentor in the first Ducks installment, Bombay regresses to his me-first ways as a sellout public figure in D2, the second edition of Ducks. By D3, Bombay has left the coaching box for a return to the courtroom, though still cameos as the once-again compassionate, loving patriarch of the Flying V.
Conversation