Congratulations to Tony Bennett for realizing he is no longer up to the task of coaching the University of Virginia’s head basketball team.

Bennett, 55, won over 70 percent of his games at UVA, including the 2019 national championship. His demeanor was professional and his reputation was impeccable. He has more than enough money to go away and do whatever he wants.

What he doesn’t want to do, he said, is coach college ball in an environment where players are paid through name, image and likeness contracts and can transfer to any school of their choice through the transfer portal with immediate eligibility.

He wasn’t against the money, he said, but he wasn’t committed to it either.

“I looked at myself and realized that I was no longer the best coach to lead this program in this current environment,” Bennett said Friday. “If you want to make it, you have to give it your all. … The game and college athletics are not in a healthy state. I think I was able to do the job the old way.”

This is also good for him, even if his opinion about what is “healthy” and what is not is not the opinion of everyone else.

The new era of sport requires a different level of work, different sensibilities and different relationships. Head coaches face higher demands (and are paid much more to meet them). The players have more power and rights. The new system may not be perfect, but the old system also had countless problems.

That’s okay. Bennett is gone. There will be no shortage of candidates willing to coach the Cavaliers, let alone for four or five million dollars a year.

And yet…when Bennett declared that the transactional nature of modern college sports was just too much, he simply reached into his personal transfer portal on the eve of the season and let everyone down.

As a result, the players he recruited and retained at Virginia will begin the season without the head coach they were expected to play for when they decided to join the team. Instead, UVA will turn to one of Bennett’s assistant coaches (a side topic in itself).

Due to new NCAA rules, Virginia players will be given the option of immediate transfer. However, just weeks before the start of the season and in the middle of the academic calendar, options are limited – if not impossible.

They could also choose to redshirt, sit out the season and then move to a new location where they could play for the expected coach, but that’s also a pretty big burden on them.

When Bennett denounced the sport’s new problems, he was capitalizing on the sport’s old problems – almost all the power used to be in the hands of the coaches. You have made decisions. The players had to live with it.

The national letter of intent was legally one-sided – it linked a player to a school, but the school could still reject him. Coaches could limit which schools players transfer to; Sometimes they blocked 30 or 40 options. The move required a break from the season.

Oh, and no one was legally able to get paid for their own fame, let alone the millions it brought into the school.

The old system was vehemently opposed to someone like Caitlin Clark making money in a State Farm commercial or a player getting a share of a jersey sale, let alone boosters pooling money for de facto salaries.

The courts have ruled all of this illegal because of the pesky Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

Now things have changed and for some coaches it’s too much to bear. That’s okay too. There are other trainers who like the job better because they don’t make millions doing virtually unpaid work.

Bennett was clearly worried, but he conducted business as usual. In June, he signed a contract extension through 2030. This offseason, he brought in seven new players – two high school recruits and five transfers. All spring, summer and fall, everyone believed Bennett would be the coach.

Yes, players should always think about the school, not the basketball administration, and no, being “forced” to attend Virginia University for at least a year is not a prison sentence. It’s still hypocritical to denounce a system in which players are allowed to make decisions on a whim while making a decision on a whim.

Giving up is giving up. And good or bad, for reasonable or incomprehensible reasons, that was it.

Couldn’t Bennett have done this in April or even late March at the end of Virginia’s season? There is no perfect time for a coach to retire — Bennett rightly lamented the disorganized NCAA calendar — but almost any time is better than now.

Bennett is not the first coach to leave shortly before the season, perhaps in the hope of being able to bring in his loyal assistant. Even the legendary Dean Smith did it in North Carolina in 1997. However, Smith was 66 at the time and recruits routinely asked if he would be there for them.

Bennett’s resignation came out of nowhere, stating that the new system was too much to handle.

Now the players who believed in him have to face the consequences.

At least on this day, the old school defeated the new school.