MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – About an hour after Darian DeVries was finished telling Indiana basketball fans today basically the same things he told West Virginia basketball fans in the WVU Coliseum less than a year ago, Wren Baker was sitting alone at the dais inside the Milan Puskar Center taking questions about DeVries’ replacement.
His press conference today lasted more than 40 minutes.
“First of all, I want to say thank you to our team this year,” he began. “I thought they did a really good job, the players, our coaches and that includes coach DeVries. They won 19 games, won 10 Big 12 games, and I felt like we laid a really solid foundation in year one and I’m very proud of them.
“I was prepared to continue to invest in the program, and I am prepared to do that,” he continued. “We are going to be competitive in (revenue) share, competitive in (Name, Image and Likeness) and competitive in budget. Coach DeVries and I had several conversations, and we were prepared to invest in him and his staff. We had been talking about that for several weeks, and I felt good about the plan, but ultimately, he made the decision to leave for another institution.
“I am at peace that we were aggressive in trying to retain him, and I recognize that it’s not my decision to make. He gets to make that, so we wish him well, and my job now is to focus on our student-athletes, on our program and on our fans.”
Baker’s message to the current players is to give the new coach a chance to re-recruit them. His promise to them is West Virginia will be resource-competitive within the Big 12 Conference and nationally.
His goal is to find a coach who is committed to the players, the University and to the state.
“We have a great basketball tradition,” Baker said. “We’ve been to 31 NCAA Tournaments, 11 Sweet 16s and two Final Fours. We’ve got tremendous fans who make our home court one of the best advantages in the country, and that’s not me saying that (advanced analytics confirms it).
“And the No. 1 thing is we have some of the best people in the world, and they deserve a coach and a program that they can be proud of,” he added.
Baker believes West Virginia’s success winning 19 games during DeVries’ year here with a completely new roster is proof that the next coach can also experience immediate success in the transfer portal era.
He anticipates great interest in the position because of West Virginia’s commitment to having competitive resources and a competitive basketball budget enhanced by DeVries’ buyout clause in his contract being paid by Indiana.
Published reports in Indiana indicated the buyout is more than $4.6 million, but it will exceed $6 million because it will also include West Virginia’s portion of DeVries’ buyout from Drake last year.
“I feel commitments should work both ways, and people have asked me, ‘Do you wish the buyout was higher?’ It’s a pretty high buyout,” Baker noted. “I’m not aware of anyone paying a bigger one.
“In addition to the buyout, we had a date in there that if he left before April 30, he also owed us our up-front costs, which included some moving costs, maybe a sign-on bonus and what we had to pay Drake to hire him,” he said. “So, if there is a bigger number out there, I haven’t seen it. I’ve asked a couple of national media guys, and they can’t recall a bigger one for a men’s basketball coach. Ultimately, we’ll have that coming into us and that will give us a chance to have something to work with as we embark upon this search.”
Baker indicated the search process began yesterday once DeVries made it known to him that he was accepting the Indiana position.
“We have a head start because we did a lot of work last year, and we had a lot of time last year to dig deep knowing that we had an interim coach in place and could feasibly have a search,” he said. “While some of those candidates are off the board, and some new ones are on the board, a lot of them we’ve already done deep, deep dives into them.”
West Virginia’s 13th athletics director admits it is easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to losing a coach after less than one year at the helm, but he’s still committed to the process and the principles that he’s always had regarding coaching searches.
“Human nature is to think, ‘Oh, we have to get someone who is connected to here’ and I just think your job is to go out and get the best coach that you can,” he said. “You want to have coaches who other people covet and want to come after. The alternative to that is nobody wants your coach, and that’s not very good.
“There are coaches who maybe have ties to here and you are still at risk of losing them,” he added. “I don’t know that you change your profile very much. I do think this is a place about fit, and we spend a lot of time in the search process hammering that away, I almost feel like sometimes too much.”
He added, “Do I wish that we weren’t sitting here doing this a year later? The answer is yes. But does that mean that there was something wrong with our process? I don’t think so.”
Baker said he is in regular contact with incoming West Virginia University president Michael T. Benson and current president Gordon Gee.
“I have two bosses right now, and really three, since my mother is in town right now,” he joked.
Baker concluded his opening statement by reiterating that the West Virginia men’s basketball job is an outstanding one.
“This is a great community, it’s a great state and it’s filled with some of the best people that I have ever had a chance to know,” he said. “The next coach here is going to be extremely fortunate and lucky to be our coach, and hopefully they come in here and put down roots.”
Baker indicated his next visit with media will be when he introduces West Virginia’s 24th men’s basketball coach.
