Virginia to hire Ryan Odom, who once engineered 16-seed upset of No. 1 Cavaliers in NCAA Tournament
Virginia has landed its next coach — and it only had to make a little more than an hour’s drive to do it. VCU’s Ryan Odom will be leaving Richmond, Virginia, and is headed to nearby Charlottesville to run the Cavaliers’ men’s basketball program, sources told CBS Sports.
Odom and 11th-seeded VCU lost Thursday in the first round of the tournament to No. 6 BYU, 80-71.
An official announcement from Virginia will be made Saturday, per sources. Odom has already signed paperwork and will be headed to the ACC. A press conference is scheduled for Monday.
Odom, who before his time at VCU famously coached 16-seed UMBC to a first-of-its-kind win over No. 1 overall seed Virginia in the 2018 NCAA Tournament, will ironically enough be Tony Bennett’s successor after Bennett’s surprise preseason retirement last October.
Bennett coached Virginia for 15 seasons and rebounded from the stunning first-round upset to Odom’s UMBC team by winning the first national championship in program history a year later, in 2019.
Now, an unprecedented story in college sports history gets a postscript twist.
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Since that championship triumph, Virginia hasn’t won a single NCAA Tournament game as the program stagnated. Bennett stepped away just weeks before the start of the season, saying he was “no longer equipped” to coach in the current era of college basketball.
The Cavaliers played this past season under interim coach Ron Sanchez and finished 15-17 (8-12 in a down ACC). Odom, meanwhile, coached VCU to the A-10 regular season and tournament titles this past season. Virginia reached out to other prospective coaching candidates dating back to February, sources said, but it abandoned all other contenders for the job not longer after. Odom — who has Charlottesville ties — has privately been the guy for weeks. His father, Dave, previously served as an assistant at Virginia in the 1980s.
Odom went 52-21 in two seasons at VCU. He also had a two-year run at Utah State that followed his five-year stint at UMBC. In all, Odom has a 201-117 record in nine seasons as a Division I coach.
