Fair Trade? Indiana Gets Their Guy While WVU Acquires Large Buyout

Maybe Darian DeVries leaving turns out to be a good thing for West Virginia.

Indiana University men's basketball Head Coach Darian DeVries speaks at the introductory press conference at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall on Wednesday, March 19, 2025. / Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Wren Baker would have preferred to not be conducting a coaching search for the men's basketball job once again, but here we are.

The only positive that comes out of Darian DeVries' decision to take the job at Indiana is that West Virginia will be paid handsomely for it. Perhaps in the end, it could turn out to be the best thing that happened.

"The trade"

Indiana receives: Darian DeVries

West Virginia receives: $6.1 million buyout, new coach

Instead of looking at it as West Virginia lost a really good coach, let's try to flip it this way. The Mountaineers are getting a big check that they can do a lot of things with and could still land a quality coach who wants to build something in Morgantown and plant roots here. If it all pans out, there won't be nearly as much frustration with how this all went down.

“Collecting $6 million will help us make a transition to a new coach and help us with some other items and other things. But I would rather have a coach that’s building sustained success that people are getting endeared to and feeling good about," Baker said in his press conference earlier this week.

“It probably opens up your search a little bit because you could potentially pay a larger buyout to buy somebody out if you really wanted to do that, whereas a year ago that would have been a tougher thing for us to do. I think for me, it’s a sequence of things. The first thing is to go out and identify the coach that I think is the best coach to lead our program and then figure out what that compensation and contract needs to be, what the buyout is for that individual, see what’s left of that $6 million and then probably fight with colleagues throughout the department and probably colleagues on campus of how we’re dividing that up. I think, really, right now, my only focus is to get the basketball coach and then we’ll figure out what’s the best thing to do with that money coming in.”

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