I might be “fringe media,” but a contract extension signed on June 13, and announced that afternoon, with an “effective date of proposed extension” listed as June 1, that all kinda feels like a rush job to me.
That last detail that I’m referring to there, about the “effective date of proposed extension,” is from a copy of the offer sheet from UVA Athletics to men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett that was finally made available to me today in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that I made back seemingly a lifetime ago, back on June 13.
By that point, back on June 13, when the news of the extension was splashed out by UVA Athletics, I’d been writing for weeks about Bennett’s contract status, which until that June 13 announcement seemed very much up in the air.
At the date of our first story on Bennett’s status, a month earlier, on May 13, he had just two years left on a contract extension that he had signed way back in 2019, which at that point was his third contract extension in a five-year period.
From three extensions in five years, we went five years without another extension, and Bennett, at that May 13 date, was on the clock, T-minus two years and counting.
After reporting this, I worked to address speculation around the program and among the more nervous of those in the fan base that the move made last summer by Ron Sanchez, a former Bennett assistant who had left to take the head job at Charlotte, then left after a decent five-year run there to take a $200,000 pay cut to return to UVA, was part of a plan to have Sanchez in place to replace Bennett at the end of the 2025-2026 season.
There seemed to maybe be something there when we requested, through FOIA, the contracts of Bennett’s staff members, and learned that Sanchez’s deal actually went through the 2026-2027 season, one season longer than Bennett’s own deal.
Maybe it’s just me, but an assistant having a contract running a year longer than the head guy is a head-scratcher, and worthy of a headline.
This would be dismissed as “much ado” on the part of “fringe media” in a June 11 report from Mike Barber at the Times-Dispatch, in which it was claimed that Bennett was at the same time not aware of when his deal was set to expire, but also that he’d had a contract extension on the table dating back to around the time of the ACC spring meetings, which wrapped on May 15, two days after our first reporting on the contract-status story.
Barber, as it turns out, also reported today on the Bennett contract extension, focusing his attention on Bennett’s salary, which will not change with the extension that keeps him bound to UVA through the end of the 2029-2030 season, with an additional year tacked on if Bennett is still at the school on April 30, 2026.
I’ll wonder aloud here if Barber had to wait out, like I did, the 12 working days, plus the Juneteenth holiday, to get an answer to his own public-records request, or if the university just decided to make the records that I’d requested weeks ago and was forced to wait for because they were too busy to send me a one-page PDF available to everybody at the same time.
I’ll go ahead and assume, just to be fair, that he was doing his homework, too, and filed his FOIA request back on June 13, and had to wait out the FOIA office like I did, if only because, I want that to be true.
Just to be clear on a key point here: the university, in its first response to our request related to Bennett’s contract status, reported back that there was no record of any contract extension offer for Bennett being on the table at that time.
That was something I was most interested in seeing when I’d made my June 13 follow-up FOIA request – any indication of the date that the extension was offered.
Basically, either I’d catch UVA in a FOIA violation for withholding the record of the contract extension from back when I’d first requested information on one, if there was one, or we’d find out that the extension was offered after our first reporting on Bennett’s contract status, which would justify the ungodly amount of time and mental energy that I expended on this matter.
The date listed in the offer sheet as the “effective date for proposed extension,” again, is June 1, and it wasn’t signed, again, until June 13.
The extension, pretty clearly, was put on the table at some time after our initial reporting on this story.
In short, we were onto something, though the nature of the something that we were onto is still not known.
The Occam’s razor explanation would point to plain simple oversight on the part of Bennett and the athletics director, Carla Williams, that, once it came to their attention, maybe as a result of the reporting that helped bring the situation to light, they worked quickly to addresss.
And you know what, I’m going to stick with that one, if only because, as I said above, I want that to be true.
I will add that it would seem to be clear that the UVA Athletics media-relations folks could have nipped this whole thing in the bud just by being a smidge up front when I first reached out to them to ask about Bennett’s contract status on May 6, and instead of just telling me that something was in the works, if something was, indeed, in the works, told me that I would need to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get at my contract-status question.
I get a quiet answer back along the lines of, “Chris, we’re working on an extension, stay tuned,” and I probably just wait for the press release.
Lesson learned there, let’s hope.
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Chris Graham
