Barry Tompkins: Getting off the coaching carousel

I know I should be rambling on about the new – and maybe improved – Golden State Warriors, or the suddenly fallible San Francisco 49ers this week. Maybe even talking free agents and the San Francisco Giants. But in my role of college sports quasi-purist, I feel as though I just need to vent a little bit. And, thankfully, you my loyal readers, are way less expensive than a shrink’s couch.

Tony Bennett quit this week. No, not the guy who left his heart in San Francisco, and not the guy who toured with Lady Gaga. This Tony Bennett was a basketball coach. A damned good one.

Just five years ago Tony Bennett won the NCAA basketball championship as the coach of the Virginia Cavaliers. He did it by turning good student-athletes into very good basketball players. He slowed the game down. His kids graduated. And, with few exceptions, you never read their names again in an NBA box score. He was a good guy, who recruited good kids, and he could really coach. I always said Tony Bennett should have been at Stanford.

I bring up Tony Bennett because he is just the latest in a string of Hall of Fame college basketball coaches who have said, “I’ve had it.” The game is no longer a coaches game. It’s a game of managing egos, managing managers, and pandering to a “student athlete” who’s making almost as much money as the coach, and is only playing for him because the check clears. And if he or she is more successful in your program than expected, it’s see you later and thanks coach. Gone to a higher bidder.

I thought about this when Jay Wright, like Bennett, an excellent coach who won national championships at Villanova, but still had some moral standing, suddenly just quit.

Then, the esteemed Mike Krzyzewski, who ran arguably the most successful college basketball program in the country, decided that he no longer wanted to coach.

And finally, Tara VanDerveer, the winningest coach in college basketball history said that she no longer would be coaching the Stanford women’s team.

Four people who loved their jobs, loved their schools, and loved what they did for a living, upped and decided they didn’t so much like it any longer.

There’s a definitive reason. Great coaching is no longer the main ingredient to great teams.

Recruiting has always been a dirty business. Stories of under-the-table payoffs to players are rampant. Jerry Tarkanian, the long time UNLV coach, was legendary. Someone once offered that if recruiting violations were a felony offense, Tarkanian would be on death row.

When Bob Boyd was coaching at Mississippi State and Hugh Durham was the coach at Georgia, they were heavily recruiting the same kid – but, alas, he was a non-qualifier. So Hugh Durham went to the kid’s high school and paid fifty thousand dollar to have the kid’s grades changed. Bob Boyd went to the kid and gave him fifty thousand dollars. The kid went to MSU. Afterward Hugh Durham phoned Bob Boyd and said, “Looks like you out-recruited me on this kid.”

I was sent to do a story on recruiting when I was working at NBC Sports. So, I went to college coaches all over the country to ask about it. I wound up at Texas A&M where the coach was a very funny guy named Shelby Metcalf. He said confidently, “95% of the coaches in the NCAA do not violate any rules of recruiting.” Which led to the obvious follow-up question: “What about the other 5%?” Metcalf did not miss a beat: “They’re nationally ranked.”

Those were ugly times. But the fact remained that once a recruit signed to play for that coach, he generally was there for four years, or at least until the NBA gobbled him up. So, a coach knew what he had.

Every coach I’ve talked to in the past couple of years has the same lament. Now you not only have to recruit incoming players, you’ve got to recruit your own players. The transfer portal and off-the-charts NIL payments have turned the game into a dribbling version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.”

The end result: The rich get richer and, like football, there are 20 or so teams who have any real chance of winning the NCAA tournament, while everybody else is merely playing for a ticket to the dance.

For some reason, Tony Bennett’s resignation for me, seemed to signify the final blow for college hoops as I knew it.

He was a small town guy from Wisconsin. He played collegiately for his dad, a legendary coach himself, at Wisconsin Green Bay.

I met Tony at Washington State when he was an assistant for his dad. Like at Green Bay, Dick Bennett turned the Cougars into a winning team before leaving the job to his son, Tony.

Tony immediately made Washington State a conference champion with a rag tag group of good players and hard workers. That’s who he was. And it was good enough to get him an offer to take over the reins at Virginia where he used the same style and system to win a national title.

Like his dad Dick, Krzyzewski, Wright, and VanDerveer, Tony Bennett felt coaching was a calling. Make a student-athlete a better player, a better person, and a better contributor to society.

I’ve always felt that college players should be paid for their efforts and what they contribute to the reputation of the University. But now, it’s the wild, wild west.

Now we’re down to how much, how long, and how do I get out of here. The game hasn’t changed, but the system has. Duke will always be amongst the best. Villanova has lost significance since Wright left. Virginia is constantly beaten by more athletic teams. And the Stanford women are not ranked in the pre-season top-20 for the first time in 25 years.

You may not be able to buy happiness. But these days you can sure as hell buy a national ranking.

Sorry Tony.

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native.  Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.