Baker: WVU Made An Aggressive Push to Retain Darian DeVries

WVU made an aggressive push to keep former men’s basketball coach Darian DeVries in Morgantown, according to athletic director Wren Baker.

During a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Baker said WVU was prepared to make very competitive offers to retain DeVries before he ultimately reached a deal with Indiana University.

“I was prepared to continue to invest in the program and am prepared to continue to do that,” Baker said. “Coach DeVries and I had several conversations and we were prepared to invest in him and his staff and had been talking about that for several weeks.”

Baker said he first sat down with DeVries’s agent as early as February to discuss the possibility of a new contract. By that time, WVU had already notched marquee wins over Gonzaga, Kansas and Iowa State.

“I think I first talked to his agent in early February and said we wanted to make sure that we rewarded his success,” Baker said. “I sat down with him several times over the last few weeks to talk about his contract, his compensation and what we could do.”

DeVries’s name had been brought up in a number of other coaching searches around the country, but Baker felt good about WVU retaining him until Indiana started to show interest.

“Pretty much every job that was open inquired to see if he would have interest,” Baker said. “To my knowledge, he only talked to one, so I don’t think it was a situation where he didn’t feel good about here. There were probably things about Indiana that were very attractive to him.”

“There were a lot of jobs that called that I know he declined to speak with. Maybe there were only two or three jobs that could’ve pried him away and one of them came along.”

The exact details of DeVries’s contract with Indiana have not yet been released, but it is reportedly a six-year deal that would pay him nearly $5 million per season. IU already made a major financial commitment to DeVries by paying WVU more than $6 million to buy out his contract.

Baker said he was able to pull together the resources to make a competitive offer to keep DeVries but was not given the opportunity to counter what Indiana offered.

“It was competitive and I made it clear to him that I would like a chance to counter if there was an offer that came from Indiana,” Baker said. “Just the way it unfolded, we didn’t get that chance. 

“We had a lot of donors over the course of the last few weeks who were very interested in keeping Darian DeVries and continuing to build on what we were doing. I do think we could’ve made a competitive counteroffer. What that could’ve ultimately done, I don’t know but I wanted a chance to do that and it just didn’t work out. By the time he had the offer (from Indiana), I think he was pretty set on that that’s what he was going to do.”

While Baker certainly did not want to see DeVries leave, he said the $6 million WVU will be getting from Indiana for his buyout puts West Virginia in a strong position this hiring cycle.

“I think we were very aggressive in trying to make sure that Darian knew that we were going to do whatever it took for our program to be competitive in the Big 12, which makes you competitive nationally,” Baker said. “What we have allocated for staff and budget and what we were willing to do for him were all very competitive in the Big 12. We laid that vision out and, ultimately, it wasn’t enough.

“I’m at peace that we were aggressive in trying to retain him and, ultimately, I recognize that it’s not my decision to make, he gets to make that.”

For a related story, Darian DeVries couldn’t pass up “dream job” at Indiana.