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Pete Thamel, ESPN
West Virginia is set to hire Drake‘s Darian DeVries as its next men’s basketball coach, sources told ESPN on Sunday.
The agreement is expected to be for five years, sources said.
DeVries has emerged as one of the country’s top mid-major coaches in recent years, leading Drake to the NCAA tournament in three of the past four seasons. He’s won at least 25 games in each of the last four seasons and has a record of 150-55 over six seasons at Drake.
DeVries takes the vacancy created when Bob Huggins left WVU amid a hailstorm of controversy in the wake of his DUI arrest in June. The school placed assistant coach Josh Eilert in charge for the 2023-24 season before reopening the search for Huggins’ full-time replacement.
The hire comes in the wake of a nationwide search that saw WVU officials visit multiple candidates in person.
DeVries’ experience includes 17 seasons as an assistant coach at Creighton and 20 total seasons on staff with the Bluejays. His time there included working for both Dana Altman and Greg McDermott.
DeVries takes over a WVU program that went 9-23 this season, including a 4-14 mark that tied for the bottom of the Big 12. They reached the NCAA tournament under Huggins in 13 of the prior 18 seasons a tournament was held, including the Final Four in 2010.
He enters a job with both NCAA tournament expectations and amid a Big 12 that’s been consistently the most challenging in the sport in recent seasons.
The immediate question after DeVries’ hiring will be whether his son, Tucker DeVries, will go with him. DeVries, a 6-foot-7 guard, averaged 21.6 points per game this season and 18.6 in 2022-23. He’s scored 1,867 points in his career and will be considered among the best players in the country next season.
Drake won a First Four game in the 2021 NCAA tournament and lost in the first round to Miami in 2023 and Washington State this year. Drake won the Missouri Valley regular-season title in DeVries’ first season at Drake in 2018-19.