Mailbag: Is UVA not willing to work with its coaches to get wish-list athletes admitted?

I talked with somebody in the basketball program this week, and the word is, the entire coaching staff is frustrated. When I asked why, the answer was, basically, the school is not willing to bend on transfer credits, and their frustration is, other high-academic schools do seem willing to bend on that.

What is your sense on this?

G.

My inclination is to say, be patient, but my sense, from scanning social media, is that patience is wearing thin, if there’s any left.

Enough with trying to be politically correct: the first thought that came to mind when I got this mailbag item was, Tony may have to pull a Groh.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

Al Groh, in 2006, six years into his tenure, stacked up a Top 10 recruiting class, the only problem being, eight of the 24 players that he signed for that year’s class didn’t qualify academically.

Now, let’s be clear, Al Groh, six years into being the coach at UVA, also being an alum of UVA, didn’t suddenly just plain forget to account for the part about needing to get the kids he’d recruited admitted into school.

He was making a point: if the admissions folks won’t work with me on getting kids in, I can’t win here.

We know who won that one: after averaging eight wins a year from 2002-2005, Groh was under .500 in three of his final four, including a 3-9 record in his last season, 2009, which began with a 26-14 loss to William & Mary, an FCS program.

How this applies to Tony Bennett: he’s having high-profile transfer recruiting targets visit, and presumably, he wouldn’t have the kids go to the trouble if he didn’t think they’d be fits, both in his program and on Grounds.

Bennett has been getting kids admitted into UVA for 15 years.

But now, all the sudden, out of the blue, he’s bringing kids in who can’t qualify.

Sure.

Now, again, to be clear, I don’t think Tony is pulling a Groh – I like both guys, but Tony Bennett isn’t Al Groh, not the confrontational sort.

I can understand his frustration, though.

To be blunt, Tony Bennett is not Coach K, and now Jon Scheyer, putting his school’s high academic reputation through the ringer for a years-long parade of one-and-dones who go to summer school, take a couple of classes in the fall, then bail out after the NCAA Tournament to prepare for the NBA Draft.

Ryan Dunn is the fifth of Bennett’s UVA recruits, dating back to 2009, to leave school early for the NBA Draft.

That’s five guys in 15 years, with three of those, De’Andre Hunter, Ty Jerome and Kyle Guy, all leaving with one year of eligibility after the 2019 national championship.

I’d think this track record would earn Bennett some slack, if slack was even needed, from the admissions folks, but then, this has been an issue at the University of Virginia dating back long before the transfer portal, long before Al Groh tried his hand at playing recruiting mind games.

Colgate Darden, the UVA president in 1952, famously turned down an invite for the football team to play in the 1952 Orange Bowl, citing his desire to steer clear of “big-time, highly subsidized football.”

That was the first ever bowl invite for the Virginia football program; UVA would not play its first bowl game until 1984, and finally got another invite to the Orange Bowl all the way out into 2019, 67 years after turning down that first one.

Even as Darden’s successors loosened up the reins on “big-time, highly subsidized” sports at UVA, it’s been an uneasy alliance, to say the least, between the academics side and the “jocular,” the word that will forever be tied to another former UVA president, John Casteen, athletics side.

It’s almost like the people in charge still think, like Darden did in the 1950s, OK, sure, we want to be good in football, in basketball, the rest, but we don’t want to be, you know, too good.

Is this what’s going on here with the basketball program and the transfer portal?

I didn’t pick this item from the mailbag without having some purpose toward wanting to address this topic.

Like it or not, Tony may have to pull a Groh next season, by which I mean, whether he wants to or not, he may have to grit his teeth and preside over a slog of a season, one that has us struggling to even get an invite to the first round of the ACC Tournament, to get the folks on the other side of Grounds to come to their senses.

I say that, of course, knowing full well that those same folks didn’t come to their senses after Groh fought his battle in 2006, and the effect of that has been, what, we’ve had four winning seasons from UVA football since?

Not even two decades of half-empty stadiums has gotten any movement from the academic folks to help football.

But hey, at least we’re not having to turn down invites to the Orange Bowl, right?

What I can’t figure out is, all those supposedly smart people in the administration and the Board of Visitors have been spending money like drunken sailors on a new football ops center and a giant scoreboard for Scott Stadium and a new softball park and the rest, and they don’t have the common sense to be willing to work with the coaches to help them field teams that can attract the butts to the seats to make it all worthwhile.

Maybe they’re not as smart as they think they are, is the point here.