Canaries in the mine

 We won't know until today why Tony Bennett abruptly decided to walk away from college buckets yesterday. That's when the announcement becomes formal and he gets up in front of the world and tells us.

Couple of things we can surmise, though.

One, it wasn't all that abrupt.

Two, it's not because he got sick of the Xs-and-Os.

More likely, it's because Virginia's decorated coach finally got his fill of college athletics in the time of NIL and the unregulated transfer portal. We can surmise this because of an interview not all that long ago in which he he didn't exactly sound enthusiastic about what had happened to a landscape that had become the wild west of myth and legend.

That may or may not be the whole story, but it's the part that makes the most sense when one of college basketball elite coaches decides to leave his high-dollar job a month before the start of another season. And at the age of 55, which isn't young but isn't old, either. And not because of health.

Regardless, it'snot a good thing when a two-time national coach of the year with a national championship, six ACC titles and 10 tournament appearances in 16 seasons at Virginia apparently decides he's had enough of this shite, so to speak. And at an age when coaches with that sort of resume are usually just entering legendary status.

It makes Bennett the latest canary in the mine for college athletics, signaling there's poison in its air and it's getting thicker. Nick Saban walked away from the Alabama football job this year because he was sick to death of the lack of guardrails in the new reality. And it's only been two years since one of Bennett's contemporaries in basketball, Villanova coach Jay Wright, abruptly hung it up after two national titles and 642 wins in 28 seasons at 'Nova and Hofstra.

Wright was only 60 years old at the time.

And now, Tony Bennett. And it's easier than it should be to understand why.

Recruiting was hard enough, and demeaning enough, back in the day, when all a coach had to do was convince some 18-year-old to matriculate at Whatsammatta U. A grown man having to suck up to high school kids certainly was distasteful, but it was worth it if you it landed you a 5-star or two. 

The Blob is almost alone in this, but I think it got even more distasteful when coaches stopped behaving like gentlemen and kept recruiting a kid even after he or she had committed to a school. There was simply too much capital at stake to respect the young man or woman's decision, let alone respecting the coaching staff that recruited him or her.

To hell with them, and to hell with propriety. A cutthroat business demanded a cutthroat mentality.

And it backfired on them cataclysmically when the kids they were recruiting -- following the grownups' example, as kids will do -- adopted the same mentality. 

In other words: You want me? Pay me. You want to keep me? Pay me more, and play me x minutes, or I'll jump in the transfer portal and go somewhere else. The NCAA won't stop me from doing that as many times as I like, and you CAN'T stop me.

Imagine being a coach and having to deal with that, as well as everything else a coach has to deal with. Imagine recruiting a kid, and then having to re-recruit him every year to keep him from flying the coop. Now imagine having to do that with six or seven other kids -- or, in football, maybe 30 or 40.

That coaches and administrators brought all this on themselves by making college sports as wholly corporate as Microsoft or Amazon is wickedly ironic -- and a nightmare from which the perpetrators cannot wake fast enough.

A nightmare, it seems, more and more of them are choosing to escape.