BATON ROUGE, La. — Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, Buzz Williams and … Tony Benford? “Haha! Hahaha!” Benford bellows. “One guy is alone there, I’ll tell you that.” Benford is practical enough that at times like these, sitting with a reporter in an empty practice gymnasium, he can laugh at the situation in which he finds himself: the black sheep of an NCAA Sweet 16 regional in Washington D.C. that also includes college basketball’s all-time wins leader, a Hall-of-Fame tactician with seven Final Four trips and a widely respected coach who has turned an ACC bottom-dweller into a consistent tournament team.
LSU Interim Coach Tony Benford Is More Than a Placeholder
