Immediately after Selection Sunday, I thought I would devote a good bit of time to the NCAA’s snub of WVU in the men’s basketball tournament. I’ll save that for another day, but suffice to say that even national pundits were on WVU’s side this time – which seems to never happen.
Instead, the NCAA snub was just the first part of a rough 1-2 gut punch for WVU fans. The second was Darian DeVries leaving after just one year at the helm. So WVU will have its fourth head coach in four years. DeVries elected to go back to his Midwest roots and take the Indiana job. It is a more prestigious job, even if WVU has had more impressive results over the last 20 years. The reason for that is they are in the Big 10, which as a whole has more resources than most other conferences, and they do have multiple national championships in their history (with the last one in 1987).
That said, it was pretty low class by DeVries to go out the way he did. Leaving after one year isn’t a great thing to do, unless there is a pretty compelling reason. I’m not sure that leaving for a team that has finished eighth or worse in literally half of the last 20 seasons is a compelling reason. There were rumors that DeVries may have been tempted to go to Iowa – which is his home state – but that turned out to be a smokescreen, because Indiana was his target all along. To further drive home the low class nature of his departure, it’s apparent that he didn’t bother to address the team about him leaving, and he didn’t even send out a “Thank you” to WVU or its fans. (Virtually every coach does that after leaving – even many who get fired).
To be clear, we don’t know how long Indiana had been directly or indirectly negotiating with DeVries. We do know that Mike Woodson, the former coach, announced on February 7 that he would be stepping down/retiring at the end of the season. We also know that in his introductory press conference, DeVries made some comments about Indiana “respected” that he had a season to finish and a need to focus on WVU. That certainly indicates that Indiana had been in contact with DeVries before the season was over. We also know that an anonymous Twitter account said on March 12, that Indiana had their next coach and it would be DeVries (that was the day of WVU’s loss to Colorado in the Big 12 tournament. The DeVries hire by Indiana was officially announce March 18).
Wren Baker’s public comments prior to DeVries leaving seemed to indicate that he thought DeVries would end up signing a revised contract with WVU. Now, that could have been spin to maybe sway DeVries’ decision, it could have been wishful thinking. It also could have been that Baker was genuinely caught off guard.
So, who’s next? Baker ended up going to someone he had some familiarity with: North Texas head coach, Ross Hodge. When Baker was the AD at North Texas, he hired Grant McCasland (now the Texas Tech coach). Hodge was his top assistant at Arkansas State, and followed McCasland to UNT. Two years ago (after Baker had left for WVU), McCasland took the Texas Tech job, and Hodge was elevated to the head job, where he went 19-15 last year, and is 27-8 this year. The Mean Green played UC-Irvine in the NIT Semifinals last night, and if they won, they would play in the Championship tomorrow night (Apr 3) at 9:00 on ESPN. I will talk more about my thoughts on Hodge next week.
The women’s basketball team won its first game in the NCAA tournament, dominating a good Columbia team, 78-59. Then they face the opening round host, UNC. The Tar Heels pulled away late in a close game to win 58-47. It felt a lot like last year’s game at Iowa, when WVU also fell to the opening round host.
The baseball team had been hoping to make a big statement by winning a series at preseason conference favorite Oklahoma State to open the Big 12 season. Instead, wildfires in Oklahoma caused the cancellation of the first two games of the series. They did get in one game, and WVU came away with a valuable 8-6 win in an exciting game. Then they hosted Arizona, who has been the best team in the Big 12 so far, and while they lost the series 2 games to 1, it was a close and exciting series. It looks like WVU has a chance to be near the top of the Big 12 standings throughout the season.
Notes: The wrestling team had a solid performance at the NCAA Championships, but only one was able to emerge an All-American. Peyton Hall wrapped up a very successful career with his third A-A honor when he placed third, his highest finish ever at NCAAs. Congratulations, Peyton!…The gymnastics team completed their season-long comeback by making the NCAA Regionals. They found themselves ranked 50th early in the season, but were able to keep improving and ended up in the field of 36.
