Hi, everybody, it's Tony Carridi, and this is an instant reaction from three guys before the game on the hiring of Darren DeVries as the 23rd head men's basketball coach at West Virginia University.

Joined by the other two guys, Brad Howe and Hoppy Kirchville.

Well, guys, Ren Baker said it shouldn't take all that long.

He was right.

It took less than two weeks for West Virginia

to get its hire made. It's Darren DeVries and Hoppe. He comes from Drake University where he has had

tremendous success and not only as a player but as a longtime assistant at Creight in West Virginia

has just hired a guy with a lot of success behind him in his coaching days.

Yeah, and Brad's going to talk a lot about that. I'm going to talk about the search, and I see four or five angles here on this search.

One is that it was data driven. It started with being data driven. Who has had success and not just wins and losses, but success, program success.

And once you do that through the broad spectrum, then you get a list of candidates,

and certainly Ren Baker had a fairly extensive list on that.

And then come the interviews, the phones or the Skype's or Zooms, and then face-to-face,

and then you start to narrow it down more and more. And you really got down to about three or four people at that point people talked about not only him but

also medved and buyington and a couple others and then is it a culture fit and Brad's going to talk

about that too is it is it a fit as opposed to just trying to hire a person? And that's

really important because he got family involved and is that coach going to feel comfortable going

from wherever they are to wherever they're to coming here. Gordon Gee had to sign off on it.

And Gordon Gee, I know, had a long conversation with DeVries and felt very good about it.

So he signed off on it.

And you also, in this search, you want your list to be, your final list to be those who want to be here.

You don't want to be in a position like Louisville that, oh, this guy turned it down, that guy turned it down.

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