CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – In 2019, Virginia basketball authored the sport’s all-time redemption tale, willing its way to the 2019 national championship a season just one year after becoming the first No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 16 in the history of the NCAA Tournament.
Six years later, UVA is neither powerhouse nor punchline. It’s on the verge of slipping into something arguably worse – irrelevance.
So it was quite the full circle moment on Monday when Ryan Odom, the very coach who led UMBC to that epic first-round upset in 2018, was announced as the new head coach at Virginia. Odom spent the last two seasons at VCU, where he just led the Rams to Atlantic-10 regular season and tournament championships. Before that, Odom went 44-25 in two seasons at Utah State and coached in the 2023 NCAA Tournament. Now he is in charge of the very Virginia program he embarrassed just four years ago. “We trust him with this program,” UVA athletic director Carla Williams said. “Which is saying a lot because so many have put so much into this program. We trust Ryan with it.”
At a half-press conference, half-pep rally event at John Paul Jones Arena, where the band played and the cheerleaders waved pom poms, Odom talked to a gathering of fans, donors and media about his long history with the Virginia program, dating back to his childhood in Charlottesville, when his father was a Cavaliers’ assistant for Terry Holland. He professed his admiration for former coach Tony Bennett, his respect for UVA’s past and his commitment to its future. “I feel very prepared to take on what everyone knows is a daunting task, following Coach Bennett, following a legend,” Odom said. “I’ll be honest. I’m at peace with that. I’m not afraid of it. I wouldn’t be standing here if I was afraid of it.”
He’s unafraid — but should he be?
Odom’s job now is to figure out why this program hasn’t won an NCAA tournament game since topping Texas Tech and cutting down the nets in Minneapolis in 2019. In the five seasons leading up to the title run, Virginia went 148-29. Since then, it’s 125-64, including finishing 15-17 this past season under interim coach Ron Sanchez.
More telling: Bennett and his signature pack-line defense led Virginia to six straight NCAA tournaments from 2014-2019. The Cavaliers were 13-5 in postseason games during that run.
Since then, they’re 0-3, with a pair of first-round losses, a First Four loss and two years where they missed the NCAAs entirely.
The most obvious culprit is a dropoff in talent. Virginia signed six Top 100 recruits from 2014-2018 and all six became major impact players. In the recruiting classes in the five years since, half transferred out of the program. Only two – Reece Beekman and current guard Isaac McKneely – became bona fide stars.
Part of what drove Bennett into his surprising early retirement in October – just three weeks before the season tipped off – was Virginia’s struggles with roster management, issues exacerbated by the advent of the transfer portal and the allowing of NIL payments. About 90 percent of Virginia’s NIL money comes from its collective, Cav Futures, according to the organization’s director, Lo Davis. Davis said that the Cavaliers were making up ground the first few years of the NIL era, but are now competitive on that front.
“We got off to a late start, I think, the university in general and then Cavs Futures, because we were more reactive than proactive to NIL,” Davis said. “So, we started from scratch. The first thing we had to do and probably the biggest hurdle was that we had to convince our donor base and our fan base that this was the right thing to do, and people in the university, as well. That if you wanted to compete in today’s college landscape, you had to participate in this, whether you liked it or not. What they had to do was test that Virginia was going to do it the right way.”
Williams and UVA great Wally Walker, a former NBA general manager and member of Virginia’s search committee, declined to share specifics about Virginia’s NIL funds, with Williams saying only that the increase in financial commitment is “significant,” repeating that word for emphasis.
“When you think about what it takes to be successful in a completely new industry — like this is, not our old amateur college athletics — this is a completely new industry,” Williams said. “We have been transitioning so that it gives our coaches, particularly in football, men’s and women’s basketball, what they need to compete for championships.”
Sources indicate Odom will have between $7-8 million to operate with when he takes over, nearly four times what was available to the previous staff. That doesn’t include the revenue sharing directly from the university, which kicks in July 1.
Before then, Walker said players will be signing front-loaded deals, getting their payments before the House settlement, which includes caps on what programs can pay athletes.
“We have to be a player in the (transfer portal) window,” Walker said. “We have to have resources. We have great donors and we’re okay there.”
Money is one thing. Spending it wisely is another. The highest paid UVA player on the 2024-25 roster, per multiple sources, was Duke transfer T.J. Power. Power averaged 1.3 points and 9.4 minutes per game. He played in just 11 of 19 games once the calendar flipped to 2025, scoring all of six points in those outings.
Working with a limited NIL budget, a miss like that contributed mightily to Virginia’s struggles.
For his part, Odom expressed confidence UVA would give the financial resources he needs to attain his goal of returning the Cavaliers to an elite level. “The commitment is to try to be top ten in the country and certainly it’s going to take the resources in order to do that,” Odom said Monday. “I’m not going to get into the specifics in terms of numbers and all that, but I know the commitment is there. Ultimately, that is a part of the process of becoming a top ten program. That’s not it. That’s not the end all, be all. There’s a lot of other stuff that goes into fielding a championship basketball program.”
How much of Odom’s first Virginia roster will come from the portal remains to be seen. Six current Cavaliers were in the NCAA transfer portal as of 6 p.m. Monday — McKneely, Andrew Rohde, Blake Buchanan, Anthony Robinson, Dai Dai Ames and Power, according to a source with access to the portal database.
Odom’s ability to manage his roster, retain some key players and make some key additions in previous stops UMBC, Utah State and VCU is one of the things that impressed the search committee, Walker said. Bennett was noticeably absent from Monday’s proceedings. He had lobbied for Sanchez and his former staff to get the job on a more permanent basis. Following the team’s 2024 First Four loss to Colorado State, Bennett forged a two-year rebuilding plan, then retired and Sanchez got only half that time to execute the strategy.
It’s one of the reasons Virginia moved so quickly to honor its former coach with a Tony Bennett Day in early February. There was a concern that, had they pushed the event back until next season, Bennett might have bristled at even showing up if the school moved on from Sanchez.
Odom said he spoke with Bennett by phone as he completed his move from VCU to Virginia this week.
Odom is bringing with him most of his VCU staff, including assistants Matt Henry and Bryce Crawford, who were already hard at work by the time Virginia introduced Odom on Monday.
Longtime Odom confidant Griff Aldrich stepped down as the head coach at Longwood to become Odom’s associate head coach. (Aldrich was part of the UMBC staff when the Retrievers upset UVA.)
On Monday, the new assistants sat a few rows behind Virginia’s current players as Odom waxed poetic about his childhood in Charlottesville, his love of UVA basketball and the journey that had brought him, full circle, to this moment. He said his stints at Utah State and VCU have prepared him to quickly transition the Virginia program to his style of play, while praising the strong “culture” Bennett and Sanchez left behind.
“Tony Bennett’s style of basketball was winning basketball,” Odom said. “That’s all that I care about.”
