MORGANTOWN — There is no denying that, in his short tenure as West Virginia’s athletic director, Wren Baker has earned every penny of his paycheck.
Right out of the gate, he had to pivot to hire a new women’s basketball coach after the previous one split after just one season. Then he had to navigate and negotiate the public and messy departure of a Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach.
Now he’s on the hunt for a new football coach after firing a person who, though respected within the athletic department for the foundation he built for the program, just wasn’t able to win.
Yet, there’s a contract somewhere in WVU President Gordon Gee’s office with Baker’s signature on it saying he wanted this job. And his job right now is to find the right person to step into the highest paying and most visible public employee job in West Virginia.
So, y’know, no pressure.
“It’s a big decision,” Baker said Tuesday. “It’s important for the university, and … it’s important, I think, for the health and well being, financially and morale-wise and other, of the state. And so I recognize the magnitude of it.”
Looking at Baker’s track record at West Virginia so far, he seems to be exactly the guy you want making this decision.
Shifting gears after just one season to hire any coach is no easy task. Dawn Plitzuweit had taken WVU to just its second NCAA tournament appearance since 2017, then agreed to take the Minnesota job before the Mountaineers even got back to Morgantown from that tournament game.
Not a great situation, but Baker aced it by going to Nacogdoches, Texas, and plucking Mark Kellogg from Stephen F. Austin. Kellogg got WVU to the second round of the NCAA tournament his first season and has the Mountaineers ranked No. 15 in the country this week.
Then there was the Bob Huggins saga – the DUI arrest, the resignation, his claim that he never resigned, everything in between and everything afterward. WVU had to scramble and name Josh Eilert interim head coach for the season. That WVU team stumbled to the first single-digit win season since Gale Catlett’s final year more than two decades ago.
Yet Baker was able to hire Darian DeVries, who took Drake to three NCAA tournament appearances in three years. DeVries is another hire paying immediate dividends. In his first seven games as WVU’s coach, he has already knocked off then-No. 3 Gonzaga and then-No. 24 Arizona within three games and has West Virginia at 5-2.
It’s evident that Baker has a knack for finding good coaches. So the best plan of action in Morgantown is to give him the latitude to find another one.
I’m sure Baker will field plenty of opinions on who WVU’s next football coach should be. I can guarantee you he’s fielded plenty already. Hey, different perspectives can be good. They just can’t interfere in the process.
So let Baker take the lead. Let him go through his process. That goes for the everyday fans and the anonymous keyboard warriors. That goes for university brass and the high-profile, big-money donors. I understand those last two groups are a little tougher to ignore, but they need to understand that flashy titles and big bank accounts don’t always translate to brilliant personnel management.
Baker was able to take two coaching situations that could have sent both programs plummeting and not only steadied those ships, but put those two programs in position for great futures. The present for both is looking pretty darned good.
The clock is ticking in this process. A hire needs made quickly enough for a new coach to keep as many current Mountaineers as possible out of the transfer portal. And with Josiah Trotter already announcing his entrance into the portal, time is even more of the essence.
This is the biggest hiring decision Wren Baker will have made in his administrative career. A good football hire can set up an athletic program for years. A bad one can set it back for years.
Baker has proven he has an eye for talent. He needs to be able to do his job – so he needs everyone else to get out of the way.
— Story by Derek Redd
