Virginia’s athletic department was hit with another piece of difficult news late Sunday, when baseball coach Brian O’Connor accepted the job at Mississippi State. After 22 seasons in Charlottesville, UVa must now replace a coach that won the program’s first and only national title, and took the Hoos to the College World Series seven times.
O’Connor is one of several high-profile departures from UVa’s athletic departments in recent years. Virginia coaches have rarely left for other jobs, or for any reason other than termination, especially coaches of the school's most high-profile sports. But in the last 3.5 years, football, basketball and baseball coaches in good standing have opted to leave the University. Football coach Bronco Mendenhall stepped away, future hall-of-fame basketball coach Tony Bennett called it a career at age 55, and now O’Connor heads to Mississippi State, an almost unheard of job switch from UVa to another program.
Imagine telling a UVa fan last summer that Bennett and O’Connor would be gone within the next year, and football would still be looking for their first winning season since 2019. That wouldn’t have gone over too well. Virginia fans, in particular, are not conditioned for this sort of change. No high-profile UVa coach had left for another college job in anything that could be considered the “modern era.” Until now.
A few days after the 2021 season, Mendenhall abruptly resigned with very little warning to anyone around the program. Mendenhall was always one that marched to the beat of his own drum, so while the timing was surprising, the fact that he up and left without much notice sort of made some sense. Mendenhall led UVa for six seasons, and had the Hoos bowl eligible in his final five. He led UVa to an ACC title game and Orange Bowl in 2019 and engineered the program’s only win over Virginia Tech in 22 years, though his 1-5 record against the Hokies had plenty of fans perturbed at the end of that 2021 season.
When Mendenhall left, it seemed pretty clear that he wasn’t retiring. It was never phrased that way, and after a couple of years off, Mendenhall resurfaced at New Mexico. He’s currently at Utah State after just one year with the Lobos. That departure led to a pivotal moment in Williams tenure as AD, and she ultimately hired Tony Elliott away from Clemson to replace Mendenhall, her first revenue sport hire in four years as AD at the time.
Last fall, Bennett also suddenly and surprisingly hung it up. To say the timing of that decision was not ideal would be an understatement; UVa had already played their preseason intersquad scrimmage and were weeks away from starting the season. Bennett toyed with the idea of retiring in the spring of 2024 after the Hoos crashed out of the NCAA Tournament, but decided against it before eventually reversing course. That decision sent shockwaves around the sport and after what felt like an inevitably disappointing season, UVa has a new coach in place in Ryan Odom.
And now, O’Connor, who has turned down jobs in the past, is off to Mississippi State in a different kind of exit. Mendenhall seemed burned out with coaching, and needed a break. Bennett seemed burned out with coaching, and seems done with it, at least for the foreseeable future. O’Connor is going to press on and while he surely is adjusting to the new world of college athletics as everyone else is, he’s going straight to another job.
For the second time in less than a year, Williams and the UVa administration have to fire up a coaching search that they were hoping to avoid. And frankly, it’s fair to wonder, given UVa’s history of retaining coaches until retirement or close, what’s going on given all the turnover, and in particular the loss of UVa institutions like Bennett and O’Connor.
There are several things in play here. Sources have told us that UVa’s money players tried to make a last-minute push to keep O’Connor, and increase the budget of the program while demonstrating a higher level of commitment to the sport. Ultimately, UVa was never going to be able to match what Mississippi State would be able to offer, and we’re not specifically talking about the coach’s salary.
With a widening gap between the ACC and SEC in TV revenues, programs in the ACC are falling further behind in budgets and resourcing. And now, with the new scholarship limits and revenue sharing, schools have more autonomy on how they’ll support each program, including how many scholarships they’ll fund and whether any revenue sharing will go to a sport like baseball, as most will go to the two big revenue sports. MSU has opted to go all-in on baseball, and will support it like few programs in the country will. Clearly, they were able to sell this to O’Connor and he signed on the dotted line. O’Connor had interest before and UVa was able to keep him in Charlottesville, but not this time.
UVa supports baseball better than a lot of other programs in the ACC, but the program’s resources will not be on par with most or all of the SEC programs, and that gap will continue to widen. It seems like O’Connor is betting that it may become a lot harder to get UVa back to Omaha in this environment, and would also require asking over and over again for support from donors as the athletic department shifts resources to football and basketball. We’ve also been told that there have been occasions over the years where O’Connor struggled to get what he felt he needed for the program, with UVa’s athletics budget stretched quite thin in recent years as they’ve dealt with several different challenges and had to fund major projects. In Starkville, O’Connor probably won’t have to fight for resources, he’ll just ask and then get them.
It's also worth noting, however, that O'Connor's decision to leave is an about face from where things were a year ago. O'Connor signed an extension last June through 2031, after leading UVa to back-to-back College World Series berths. In UVa's announcement of the extension, O'Connor said "The success we've had in our time at Virginia is a testament to the university's commitment, the elite talent on the field, the loyalty to our baseball staff and the dedication of all those who support this program."
UVa went into this season with high expectations, ranked #2 in preseason polls coming off those back-to-back trips to Omaha. The Hoos didn't even make the NCAA Tournament in what has to be described as a frustrating season, but clearly, despite not having the resources of some SEC and even ACC programs, UVa was expected to be very competitive. So perhaps O'Connor's decision to leave is more about where he thinks things are going, rather than where they've been.
O’Connor’s departure is not quite the same as Bennett and Mendenhall’s. Bennett didn’t like where college sports were going, so he walked away. Mendenhall needed a break. O’Connor, like Bennett, has read where his sport is headed, and is going to simply play that game at a better-funded program.
So is there anyone to blame for this? Williams has been the athletic director when all of these departures have taken place, and now for the third time deals with the fallout. It’s worth noting that on their way out the door, both Mendenhall and Bennett praised Williams and it seemed relatively clear that they were leaving for their own reasons more so than being unhappy with UVa specifically. Only O’Connor can tell us how happy he was at Virginia, but even if he loved working at the University, he’s choosing to leave it.
Williams has led UVa athletics during some trying times, through COVID and all of the financial fallout from that, and the tragic on-Grounds shooting that claimed the lives of three football players in 2022. She’s also now trying to manage a radically shifting college sports landscape that includes player payments and revenue sharing, different scholarship limits and potential conference realignment waiting in the wings. It’s a lot to manage, but it becomes a lot harder when hall-of-fame coaches are walking out the door.
Williams signed a five-year extension in December that runs through 2030, which signifies a mutual commitment between her and the University, though she has been far less out-in-public of late. She never spoke publicly about her vision for the football program after another losing season, she spent the basketball season looking for a replacement for Bennett, and, oddly, she hasn’t tweeted anything about UVa athletics developments since November, something she did frequently up until then. Assuming that she is going to continue on at Virginia for some time, she has some big tasks in front of her, starting with this baseball hire.
UVa, like many athletic departments, has hard choices to make. With revenue sharing, budgets, and so on. And those decisions will often lead to more support for the two sports that turn a profit, while others, like baseball, will have to be lean or will have their needs met only after football and basketball are taken care of. Each athletic department will have their own priorities and donors and fans will have a lot to say about where they want money to go. UVa donors can donate to specific sports when they send money to VAF, for example.
But there are a few coaches at Virginia that should have the authority, within reason, to say “I need X for my program,” and UVa’s administration and donors should make those deliverables a priority. O’Connor was one of them, and clearly he feels he needs the extras that Mississippi State can provide him. Yes, we know that baseball doesn’t turn a profit, but it’s a high profile sport for the athletic department, and it means a lot to a lot of people. And now UVa’s administration will need to find a replacement that can keep the program afloat with whatever resources are made available to them.
While we were told that UVa donors put together an enhanced budget to sell to O’Connor, this was done hastily and a lot of action took place in the last few days, after the Mississippi State pursuit of UVa’s coach was public knowledge, at least to anyone with an X account or a subscription to literally any site covering Virginia sports. While it might not be fair to say UVa’s administration wasn’t prepared for this move at all, it certainly seemed like their efforts to turn the ship around were reactive rather than proactive. In the end, it didn’t matter.
If we’re being fair, there might not have been a ton that Williams or anyone could have done to keep O’Connor at Virginia. Only O’Connor knows that. But the result is still a negative, and that’s not great for an athletic department that had a rough academic year. Virginia had another losing football season, their first losing men’s basketball season in more than a decade, another losing season on the women’s side, no lacrosse or baseball NCAA bids in the spring and their two most high-profile coaches, who served at the University for a combined 38 seasons, and won the school's two most high-profile national titles, are now gone.
It’s another pivotal moment for Williams and the UVa athletic department, something that we’ve had to say far too often lately.
