MORGANTOWN — For those who appreciate the ESPN way of sports entertainment, we have a major overreaction for you today.
Which is to simply say the WVU men’s basketball team will beat all projections by finishing in the top four of the Big 12 standings come this March and will find its way into the AP Top 25 poll.
Believe that, or don’t, it truly doesn’t matter either way.
But the point to take away from it all is how impressive the Mountaineers were in their 89-57 victory over Robert Morris on Monday.
Now, let’s jump back to reality for a moment. It was Robert Morris, we get that. If this was just about any other point in time, a WVU win over the Colonials wouldn’t be newsworthy at all.
Except this is 2024, smack dab in the middle of the transfer portal era of college athletics, which brings us to the larger point of what happened Monday.
There are 12 new scholarship players on the Mountaineers’ roster, not to mention a brand new coaching staff.
That is supposed to be a recipe for struggle, not fluency; awkwardness, not easy.
Yet anyone who watched the opener saw a bunch of guys who appeared to have been practicing together for seven years, not seven months.
“I thought the guys had tremendous focus and did a really nice job,” is how WVU head coach Darian DeVries put it.
What came out of the season-opening win will be the ultimate question that will follow DeVries, quite possibly, for his entire WVU coaching career, or at the very least, as long as he continues to have success this season.
Has he somehow cracked the key to mastering the portal?
There have been so many other examples with WVU hoops in recent years where the portal brought hype, excitement and tons of potential, but not a lot of wins.
There were certainly players in the past brought to Morgantown who carried with them a hefty NIL price tag, quite possibly the worst investment ever made by some of WVU’s big-money donors.
There were players previously brought in who were old enough to remember Bill Clinton’s presidency, players who had already starred at other Power Five schools and players who were superstars at smaller schools.
They ended up not being the right fit at all, and to be fair, there were obviously a lot of reasons behind that.
We now have Game 1 in the books with DeVries’ attempt at making the portal work, and Game 1 was a rousing success.
As to why that may continue to be the case, we introduce you to WVU assistant coach Kory Barnett, who knows a little bit about big-time basketball.
He played his college ball at Indiana, where basketball is a religion.
He was also a grad assistant at Indiana and an assistant coach at UCLA — you’ve probably heard of the Bruins’ rich tradition — and spent the last five seasons at Nevada, under head coach Steve Alford.
If you’re wondering about his credentials, Barnett has coached nine NBA first-round picks and has been to the Sweet 16 five times as a coach.
And what he said about DeVries’ approach to plucking guys out of the transfer portal was absolute sweet music.
“Probably the biggest frustration I had with (DeVries) is I’d find a player that I wanted to recruit and we would do our background checks,” Barnett began. “If there were any type of red flags, he would be like, ‘No.’ He has a really good pulse on what he wants his locker room to look like and he knows who he wants to coach and go to battle with every single day.”
It does not matter to DeVries, according to Barnett, that maybe a certain player was once a five-star prospect coming out of high school or maybe he averaged 20 points a game at another school.
“I would say it was a frustration, because that was a great recruit who averaged X in points, rebounds or whatever,” Barnett said. “It was also refreshing, because it’s a lot easier to work for someone who knows what they want and he knows exactly who he wants to coach.”
The amount of research Team DeVries puts into the transfer portal appears extensive and goes far beyond watching a game, or two, of a potential prospect on film and then making a phone call to a coach.
“You can’t see all (2,000) kids in the portal,” Barnett said. “But (DeVries) knows a trusted scout who saw that kid live and was around that kid as he was growing up or a coach who was around him that we can trust.”
Character outweighs stats, at least it does to DeVries. Barnett knows first hand why that’s important.
“At UCLA, we brought in a kid one time I didn’t know very well, but all the right things were said about him,” Barnett said. “What I found out is there was somebody else I should have been talking to who would have told me when adversity hits, he may not be the guy you want in the locker room.”
It is with this concept in mind — at least we hope — you see this brand new WVU roster in a different light.
True, they may not have been the most highly sought after individuals or maybe they didn’t have the most recruiting stars next to their name.
They just may be the right guys, though, the right fit.
And so we go back to Monday’s game and look at how DeVries’ bunch played together, played hard and played as a team.
Maybe we once thought it was impossible to bring in a large collection of new guys at one time and make it work right away. Maybe we were all wrong.
“It does look like winning when you’re around him,” Barnett said of DeVries. “I’ve been around losing, you feel losing. He focuses in on what helps guys win and what those details are, and he hits on it every single day.”
