UVA has invoked the seven-day extension allowed under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act to answer my request for copies of the recently announced contract extensions for Tony Bennett and Brian O’Connor.
This isn’t petty at all.
I made the requests on June 13, last Thursday, the day that UVA Athletics rolled out the announcements via press releases about new contracts for Bennett, the men’s basketball coach, and O’Connor, the baseball coach.
The only details we got for the Bennett deal is that he’s now signed through April 30, 2030, and that if he is still the coach on April 30, 2026, then he gets a rollover year extending the deal through April 30, 2021.
The sole detail in the O’Connor announcement is that he is now signed through the 2031 season.
Left unreported in the PR: salary information, terms related to buyouts, what happens if one of the coaches decides to leave for another job or retire.
I don’t expect anything out of the ordinary in the contract language, but somebody has to look just to see, and that somebody, these days, is me.
The new deadline from the UVA FOIA office to get this information back to me is July 2.
They’re literally going to send me PDF copies of the contracts.
It’s going to take them three weeks to send me PDFs.
And some folks wonder why I treat the folks over there as a hostile witness.
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Chris Graham
