MORGANTOWN — No fancy lead-ins today, because, well, I think we’d all like to get straight into the bottom line.
So here goes, Darian DeVries’ hiring at Indiana was announced on the afternoon of March 18.
On March 19, was Ross Hodge the No. 1 candidate on WVU athletic director Wren Baker’s list to become the school’s 24th men’s basketball coach?
No he wasn’t, but rest assured, Hodge’s name was on that list from the beginning, even if he wasn’t on the media’s radar or that of the fan base.
From here, the story has branches, and then some of those branches have branches.
Let’s just chop down the darned tree.
How did we get here?
The easiest answer as to how Hodge climbed up that list is basically a process of elimination.
If you’ve followed this saga, you already know who the front runners were.
How they ended up elsewhere takes some explaining.
First, we begin with Niko Medved, formerly of Colorado State, now in charge of Minnesota’s program.
Medved was a serious candidate when WVU hired DeVries in 2024. His wife, Erica, was born and raised in Morgantown and was a standout softball player at Morgantown High.
There are two stories with Medved, and honestly, we can’t begin to tell you which one to believe.
One side is WVU didn’t even approach Medved this time, because it was believed he was connected to the Minnesota job for a while.
The other side is WVU did approach Medved, who basically told the school he wasn’t interested.
Ben McCollum is believed to have been the top candidate on Day 1. He was DeVries’ replacement at Drake, and in that one season, McCollum led the Bulldogs to 31 wins and into the second round of the NCAA tournament.
He was also born in Iowa City, Iowa, the same city where the Iowa Hawkeyes’ campus is located.
Iowa fired Fran McCaffrey four days before DeVries was hired at Indiana, so it had a bit of a head start.
In the end, going back home put McCollum in Iowa, while WVU’s search continued.
Utah State head coach Jerrod Calhoun wanted to be in Morgantown.
He was interviewed. He was extensively researched. He was a serious contender.
Ultimately, Calhoun just wasn’t what Baker was looking for in a head coach.
That’s a story of analytics, which says Calhoun is more of an offensive-minded coach rather than a defensive one.
Baker wanted a defensive-minded coach.
And it’s those analytics that not only kept Hodge on Baker’s list, but kept pushing him further to the top.
At North Texas this season, only two opponents managed to score at least 70 points in a game. No one this season reached 80 against the Mean Green, which plays UC Irvine on Tuesday in the semifinals of the NIT.
In comparison, Utah State had nine opponents surpass the 80-point mark this season.
Now, the flip side to that is Utah State also broke 100 points four times and scored at least 88 points in seven other games.
The most points North Texas scored in a game this season was 83.
So, what’s the deal on Hodge?
If there is an initial ho-hum feeling from the WVU fan base toward Hodge, it’s based on his resumé.
In WVU’s press release, it quickly pointed out he’s won 80% of his games.
That’s true, but that stat includes winning 86% of the time at the junior-college level over five seasons and just 67% of the time during his two seasons as a Division I coach.
Which is the other issue WVU fans may have, in that the school just hired a guy who has only been a Division I head coach for two years.
That same school is Jerry West. It’s Joe Mazzulla. It’s Bob Huggins. It’s Mike Gansey.
It’s 31 NCAA tournaments and 11 Sweet 16s. It’s the 2010 Final Four and the 1959 national championship game.
It also has a history of success in the Big 12 under Huggins. It just went into Kansas this season and won with Javon Small and a JV team.
And the school just hired a guy with two NIT years of experience under his belt as the head coach.
Let’s wrap it up
So, does all of that mean Hodge can’t do the job? Absolutely not.
He may be the best thing since sliced bread, the problem is we just don’t know that, yet.
It’s the unknown that can scare the heck out of us all.
Baker’s track record for hiring coaches — to this point — can’t be argued.
Truthfully, we didn’t know much about Mark Kellogg in 2023, and he’s been a fantastic women’s hoops coach at WVU.
DeVries wasn’t a household name last year. Now he’s at one of the most traditional-rich schools in all of college basketball.
Steve Sabins has been great in his first season with the WVU baseball team.
In the end, there were several branches that had to be clipped in order to now have Hodge at WVU.
That just may be the result of Baker’s keen ability to see the forest through the trees.
