Heading to Arizona State
Randy Bennett is leaving the Bay Area men’s college basketball powerhouse he built to head home in the latest ripple effect of conference realignment. Bennett is leaving Saint Mary’s College, the small Catholic school in the East Bay town of Moraga, to take the head coaching job at Arizona State.
Bennett spent 25 years at Saint Mary’s and built the Gaels into a perennial contender. Saint Mary’s has had 23 consecutive seasons with a winning record, including a 27-6 record this season, and made the NCAA Tournament 12 times. The Gaels made the Dance in each of the past five seasons, and have consistently outshined Stanford and Cal — two Bay Area programs with far greater resources.
The only knock anyone against Bennett might be his lack of March Madness success, as the Gaels’ furthest run under Bennett is a single trip to the Sweet 16 in 2010.
Bennett, 63, was born and raised in Mesa — just a town over from Arizona State’s campus in Tempe — and his father was a renowned coach at an Arizona community college. He’s taking over a Sun Devils program that hasn’t been to the Sweet 16 since 1995 and has only made the NCAA Tournament three times in the past decade, all as a “last four teams in” team, while now competing in the basketball powerhouse Big 12.
That Bennett is departing now, though, is perhaps the clearest sign of how conference realignment at the very top of the sport can cause ripple effects all throughout. The Pac-12’s disintegration saw Arizona State and three other schools head to the Big 12, four schools go to the Big Ten and Stanford and Cal eventually find a lifeline with the ACC. The two remaining Pac-12 schools, Oregon State and Washington State, kept the conference alive, and saw it restock members from smaller conferences, including Gonzaga, another small college with a mighty hoops program that doubled as Saint Mary’s chief rival in the West Coast Conference (WCC).
The “Zags and Gaels” annual two games helped guarantee each other’s success in college hoops, giving each a quality conference opponent in a mid-major conference and helped boost their respective March Madness resumes. As the Associated Press’ Josh Dubow pointed out, Gonzaga has the top winning percentage of any college basketball program since the start of the 2004-05 season. Saint Mary’s has the fourth-best, only behind Duke and Kansas and ahead of other blue bloods like North Carolina, Kentucky, Arizona and Villanova.
But that conference rivalry is coming to an end, as Gonzaga will leave the WCC this summer to join the Pac-12. It’s not hard to connect the uncertainty about what a WCC looks like without a second heavyweight contender at the top to Bennett’s decision to leave now, particularly when the job in his hometown happened to come open at just the right time.
To their credit, Saint Mary’s seems to have been prepared for this. According to ESPN, the Gaels will promote associate head coach Mickey McConnell to replace Bennett, a former Gaels player from 2007 to 2011 — and member of that lone Sweet 16 team. McConnell has served as an assistant coach at the school since 2019.
Randy Bennett is leaving the Bay Area men’s college basketball powerhouse he built to head home in the latest ripple effect of conference realignment. Bennett is leaving Saint Mary’s College, the small Catholic school in the East Bay town of Moraga, to take the head coaching job at Arizona State.
Bennett spent 25 years at Saint Mary’s and built the Gaels into a perennial contender. Saint Mary’s has had 23 consecutive seasons with a winning record, including a 27-6 record this season, and made the NCAA Tournament 12 times. The Gaels made the Dance in each of the past five seasons, and have consistently outshined Stanford and Cal — two Bay Area programs with far greater resources.
The only knock anyone against Bennett might be his lack of March Madness success, as the Gaels’ furthest run under Bennett is a single trip to the Sweet 16 in 2010.
Bennett, 63, was born and raised in Mesa — just a town over from Arizona State’s campus in Tempe — and his father was a renowned coach at an Arizona community college. He’s taking over a Sun Devils program that hasn’t been to the Sweet 16 since 1995 and has only made the NCAA Tournament three times in the past decade, all as a “last four teams in” team, while now competing in the basketball powerhouse Big 12.
That Bennett is departing now, though, is perhaps the clearest sign of how conference realignment at the very top of the sport can cause ripple effects all throughout. The Pac-12’s disintegration saw Arizona State and three other schools head to the Big 12, four schools go to the Big Ten and Stanford and Cal eventually find a lifeline with the ACC. The two remaining Pac-12 schools, Oregon State and Washington State, kept the conference alive, and saw it restock members from smaller conferences, including Gonzaga, another small college with a mighty hoops program that doubled as Saint Mary’s chief rival in the West Coast Conference (WCC).
The “Zags and Gaels” annual two games helped guarantee each other’s success in college hoops, giving each a quality conference opponent in a mid-major conference and helped boost their respective March Madness resumes. As the Associated Press’ Josh Dubow pointed out, Gonzaga has the top winning percentage of any college basketball program since the start of the 2004-05 season. Saint Mary’s has the fourth-best, only behind Duke and Kansas and ahead of other blue bloods like North Carolina, Kentucky, Arizona and Villanova.
But that conference rivalry is coming to an end, as Gonzaga will leave the WCC this summer to join the Pac-12. It’s not hard to connect the uncertainty about what a WCC looks like without a second heavyweight contender at the top to Bennett’s decision to leave now, particularly when the job in his hometown happened to come open at just the right time.
To their credit, Saint Mary’s seems to have been prepared for this. According to ESPN, the Gaels will promote associate head coach Mickey McConnell to replace Bennett, a former Gaels player from 2007 to 2011 — and member of that lone Sweet 16 team. McConnell has served as an assistant coach at the school since 2019.
