Behind the scenes of Indiana basketball hiring Darian DeVries as new coach
BLOOMINGTON — On the evening March 17, 2023, anxiously awaiting tipoff of Indiana basketball’s nightcap NCAA tournament game against Kent State, IU Athletics Director Scott Dolson and his deputy, Stephen Harper, walked out onto the floor of the MVP Arena in Albany, N.Y.
Dolson and Harper had decided to watch the final minutes of a closely contested 5-vs-12 game between Miami and Drake. Despite the talent gap — Miami would eventually reach the Final Four — and despite Drake’s leading scorer shooting just 1 of 13, the Bulldogs gave Miami hell.
In fact, they led 55-47 with roughly 4 ½ minutes left, before that empty shooting and the Hurricanes’ guard-driven offense caught up with them, Drake eventually falling 63-56.
That night in Albany, Dolson turned to Harper and remarked at how impressed he was by how hard Drake played. Some 20 months later, Dolson found himself saying the same thing to the same person, this time watching West Virginia defeat Gonzaga in overtime in the opening round of last season’s Battle 4 Atlantis.
Neither time did Dolson realized the coach whose teams so impressed him would be Indiana’s next one.
Darian DeVries, who has averaged 24 wins per year across seven seasons (six at Drake, one at West Virginia), was introduced Wednesday morning as Indiana's 31st basketball coach.
The process that led Dolson to DeVries began in earnest more than a month ago, when Mike Woodson announced his decision to step down at the end of the ongoing season. Dolson would later come to realize his road to hiring DeVries began much earlier.
Yet across the weeks that followed Woodson’s announcement, Dolson managed to keep that process buttoned up so tight nearly no credible information leaked out.
With the help of a search firm (TurnkeyZRG) — and in the interests of respecting both his and other programs’ ongoing seasons — Dolson kept a profile so demonstrably low that even in the final hours of the search, college basketball power brokers still considered themselves so in the dark on IU’s intentions they wondered if Dolson had a “mystery candidate” waiting in the wings.
The mystery candidate, it turned out, was in plain sight all along.
“Nobody knew anything,” Dolson remarked as he was getting ready to leave Assembly Hall on Wednesday.
The same coach who had unwittingly impressed Dolson in two different moments, leading two different teams, now gets the chance to work with IU’s fifth-year athletic director to restore the Hoosiers’ grand tradition.
Indiana's instant connection with Darian DeVries similar to Curt Cignetti
Dolson described the coaching search as a delicate balance on multiple fronts. His first priority was making sure Woodson, his staff and his players didn’t feel the administration “checked out” on the team.
Woodson announced the 2024-25 season would be his last Feb. 7, with nine games left in the regular season. Dolson spoke with pride of the Hoosiers winning five of their last seven regular-season games and nearly reaching the NCAA Tournament.
The adversity they faced was never far from his mind, and he wanted to be equally respectful of the candidates — most of whom were active collegiate coaches — under consideration for the job.
He let them dictate when they felt comfortable talking about IU’s coaching vacancy all while doing background work that proved crucial to the process.
At the podium Wednesday afternoon, one of the staff members Dolson publicly thanked was John Decker, IU’s director of strategic communications. He laughed as he described Decker as a “mad scientist,” but it was an apt description.
Dolson tasked Decker with conducting a study similar in nature to the one that was the backbone for the department’s most recent football coaching search. That previous study focused on comparing historically similar programs, but this time Decker focused his analysis on coaches themselves, including IU’s most recent hires.
Indiana asked, for example, whether a head coach successful in a certain job had inherited any of that success, or built it from scratch.
There was a method behind that: The university was burned when it hired Archie Miller in 2017, then perceived to be a promising young coach, only for Miller to flop in Bloomington after four years without an NCAA Tournament appearance.
Decker’s number crunching picked up on the fact that Miller had more or less sustained success at Dayton, rather than built it — Brian Gregory won 97 games in his final four seasons coaching the Flyers, before handing off to Miller, who won 90 in his first four years there.
DeVries compared favorably in that analysis. Drake had won just 40 games in the four years before he arrived, compared to 95 in his first four years.
His work at West Virginia covered a smaller sample size but showed similar results. In his first season in Morgantown, DeVries’ team won 10 more games than in the previous season — it was the largest single-season turnaround in program history — six more in Big 12 play, and the Mountaineers showed demonstrable improvement in defensive metrics in particular.
Decker’s research also suggested DeVries was a capable coach in close games. Dolson said Wednesday that DeVries has a career .650 winning percentage in games decided by five points or less.
“As we looked around the country, that's something that's really significant with winning programs,” Dolson said. “All that stuff mattered.”
DeVries further solidified his candidacy through a series of conversations with Dolson, the first of which was a 15-minute phone call that left both parties wanting to speak more in-depth about the opening.
It left Dolson the same gut feeling he got after speaking to Cignetti for the first time. This search played out over a longer timeframe, but DeVries’ positive first impression stayed with Dolson throughout the process.
“It felt like an hour,” Dolson said of his first conversation with DeVries. “There is that art part of (coaching searches) in terms of his fit. I felt like from the beginning and as it went further along that he was a good fit for us."
The search concluded with an in-person sitdown between DeVries, Dolson and IU President Pam Whitten. Whitten felt an instant connection to DeVries as well.
“In that conversation you made comments recognizing the importance of teaching students at all times, student-athletes, too, and recognizing that we want to create an amazing college experience for them, as well,” Whitten said. “Thank you for that.”
Darian DeVries contract, resources to build IU basketball coaching staff, roster
DeVries will begin on a six-year deal with terms believed to be similar to Woodson’s most recent contract.
That deal, renegotiated in 2023, paid Woodson $4.2 million in guaranteed annual income, $1.3 million more than DeVries was scheduled to make next season according to the terms of his contract with West Virginia.
Indiana’s financial and resource commitment to DeVries extends beyond salary, however.
Primarily through its partnership with official collective Hoosiers Connect, IU provided what was believed to be among the most lucrative NIL pools (perhaps more than $5 million) for basketball roster construction last spring.
That number will be combined with revenue sharing for the first time. Indiana is expected to dedicate a significant chunk of its $20.5 million revenue-sharing budget — perhaps one of the largest numbers percentage-wise in the country — to men’s basketball.
“Just like last year, we'll be highly competitive,” Dolson said, “not just in our league, but nationally.”
DeVries’ is likely to gain immediate traction in the portal. That could start with his son, Tucker, the two-time Missouri Valley Conference player of the year who’s in the portal and expected to get one more year of eligibility back after missing most of last season through injury. Tucker DeVries attended his father’s introductory news conference Wednesday, wearing an IU sweatshirt.
It’s expected DeVries will move quickly in roster construction, either to retain current players and recruits he wants, or to add externally via prep and portal talent pools, maximize those resources and lock as much of his roster up as possible by the April 7 House vs. NCAA settlement date.
He will likely move with similar speed in staffing. DeVries kept a large staff at West Virginia, and he’ll have the opportunity to do so again in Bloomington.
Indiana provided Woodson the largest staffing salary pool in the Big Ten, and he kept what was believed to be the largest staff in the league as a result. DeVries will be afforded the same resources either to retain staff he might want to keep, or to hire from outside.
DeVries is expected to meet with members of IU’s previous staff in the coming days.
Titles and responsibilities also fall fully under DeVries’ control. It’s likely IU will have someone in a general manager sort of role, whether that is the title of the actual job or something similar, like director of player personnel.
For months now, Dolson has tasked Harper — an IU law school grad — with building the framework necessary to execute revenue sharing agreements and all the legal intricacies that will come with them. Dolson also expressed thanks for the support of Pete Yonkman and Tyler Harris, board member and executive director of Hoosiers Connect, respectively, two pivotal players for Indiana in the NIL space.
Everyone involved Wednesday at some point used the term “alignment” to describe the relationship between IU’s administration, under Whitten, its athletic department, under Dolson, and now its men’s basketball program, under DeVries.
The message was earnest, if straightforward: Everyone with some control over IU’s success in men’s basketball is singing from the same hymn sheet, all the time, on everything.
That support, Dolson said, gives DeVries great confidence he can succeed in Bloomington.
“Our job was always good because of the tradition and our fans, but I think our set up and knowing we are really committed and aligned, I think the interest was really high on the job,” Dolson said. “It's one of the top jobs in the county, and you can win here. That's what coaches want to do, they want to go somewhere they want to win."
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times and Zach Osterman is the Indiana beat reporter for the IndyStar. You can follow them on X @michaelniziolekand @zachosterman.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Why Indiana basketball hired Darian DeVries as new coach
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