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ACC QUESTION of WEEK : Who is the best ACC basketball coach of the past decade?
The Duke Blue Devils won two national championships in the past decade. I know that many fans will look at that important, substantial fact and shut down the debate right then and there: Coach K was the best ACC basketball coach of the past decade. It is a fair point.
Yet: It’s not the conclusion I would arrive at.
Roy Williams made back-to-back national championship games, and had Kendall Marshall not gotten injured in the 2012 NCAA Tournament, North Carolina might have had a spot in a third national championship game from the decade. The Tar Heels might have played Kentucky in New Orleans in 2012 instead of Kansas. One can very reasonably put Roy on the same plane as Coach K from 2010 through 2019, especially since Coach K and Duke could not get Zion Williamson and R.J. Barrett to the Final Four despite a loaded team. The 2011 Duke team with Kyrie Irving was knocked out in the Sweet 16.
The Virginia Cavaliers made only one Final Four in the past decade, and they won only one national title, not Duke’s two. They played in only one national championship game, not the two games Duke and UNC had. Yet, to me, Tony Bennett deserves to be recognized as the best ACC men’s basketball coach of the past decade.
This claim isn’t based on raw numbers of national titles or national championship game appearances or Final Four berths. The claim is based on where Virginia once was… and where it is now.
Virginia was a nobody in college basketball at the start of the previous decade. The 2010s began with Tony Bennett taking over from Dave Leitao, whose final season in Charlottesville — in 2009 — was a disaster. Leitao’s final UVA team was 10-18, 4-12 in the ACC. THAT is what Bennett inherited.
Virginia — in a 12-season span from 1998 through 2009 — won 192 games and lost 172, but was 75-117 in ACC regular-season games. The Cavaliers made only two NCAA Tournaments in those 12 seasons, with only one NCAA Tournament win. THAT is what Bennett inherited.
After splitting 62 games in his first two seasons (31-31), Bennett won 22 games in 2012 and made the NCAA Tournament.
He hasn’t won fewer than 22 games in any subsequent season. He missed the NCAAs only once, in 2013.
Beginning in 2014, Virginia didn’t merely become an annual NCAA Tournament team. It became the best regular-season program in the ACC. It did stumble in March, most notably the 2016 Elite Eight against Syracuse and then the 2018 1-versus-16 loss to UMBC, but Virginia simply muscled Duke and Carolina out of the way in the ACC regular season. Virginia was the No. 1 seed at the ACC Tournament four times in six seasons, from 2014 through 2019. UVA was the No. 2 seed at the ACC tourney in 2016 and this season in 2020.
Going from nowhere to the very top — having Virginia’s first national championship plus the program’s first Final Four since 1984 — makes Virginia’s meteoric rise the biggest success story of ACC basketball over the past decade.
Coach K’s two national titles and Roy’s back-to-back national title games are great achievements, without question. Tony Bennett’s achievements, placed in context, are greater.
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