NCAA Basketball: Ranking the last 25 national title winning head coaches

This is the kind of list where recency bias works as a negative. When all is said and done, Tony Bennett might work his way higher up this list, though he only just won his first national title this past season. What he’s accomplished at Virginia has been impressive and this is only the beginning for the 50-year-old head coach.

After playing for father Dick Bennett at Green Bay, Bennett played briefly with the Charlotte Hornets before beginning his coaching career. He served as an assistant under his father and Bo Ryan at Wisconsin.

In 2006, he got his shot to run a program by succeeding his father at Washington State. He led the Cougars to the Sweet 16 in 2008, impressive considering the team hasn’t returned to the NCAA Tournament since then. He was hired away by Virginia in 2009, putting into motion an incredible set of events.

He took the Cavaliers from a middling ACC team to a yearly national contender in just a decade. He already had the Cavaliers in the Sweet 16 in 2014. They’d be upended a few times in the Tournament, most famously by No. 16 seed UMBC in 2018, but Bennett and his crew fought on.

In 2019, his top-seeded Cavaliers finished the job, with Kyle Guy, Ty Jerome and De’Andre Hunter leading Virginia to their first title and some incredibly exciting March Madness moments.

The future looks bright for Bennett, even as he rebuilds his roster moving forward. He built success at Washington State and elevated Virginia to an incredible level. The resilience to respond to that UMBC upset with a national title run makes their national championship even more impressive.

For Bennett, this was his first Final Four and just his second trip beyond the Sweet 16. At this point, additional hardware could likely find its way into Bennett’s cabinet, but it’s far too early to put him any higher.