Darian DeVries faces a tall task in helping put Indiana back on the national basketball map for good

New Indiana Hoosiers coach Darian DeVries hit all the right notes Wednesday.

He wants a roster that reflects today’s changing game yet still plays a selfless, hard-nosed style. He intends to go heavily into the transfer portal this year but recruit multiyear players in coming years. And, of course, he plans to win now — and for years to come.

It’s exactly the kind of promises Hoosiers fans have been hearing for nearly a quarter-century but that have gone mostly unfulfilled. At his introductory news conference, DeVries promised this time would be different, even at a school where lofty expectations have been the norm for decades.

“I hope everybody, every fan base wants to win. I want to win. We all want to win,” he said. “The passion is awesome. You want passion in a fan base. You want that. You thrive off that. Our players thrive off that. Nobody is going to want to win as bad as I do or our players do or our staff does or our fans do. So from my standpoint, let’s do that together. Let’s go make this thing happen and let’s take this thing to as high a level as we can.”

No, the 49-year-old DeVries wasn’t quite as blunt as Hoosiers football coach Curt Cignetti, who started his tenure in December 2023 by challenging anyone who doubted he could win at Indiana to Google him.

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Make no mistake, though, DeVries’ message was the same.

He spent six seasons as Drake’s head coach, leading the Bulldogs to more 20-win seasons in DeVries’ tenure than the program had in its entire history, two regular-season Missouri Valley Conference titles and back-to-back league tournament championships before taking the West Virginia job.

It took him one season to make the Mountaineers relevant again, going from 9-23 with a last-place Big 12 finish in 2023-24 to a 19-13 mark and the cusp of an NCAA Tournament bid this season — a bid many thought was deserved.

Then, exactly a year after landing at West Virginia, DeVries returned to his Midwestern roots, explaining he couldn’t turn down the chance to join one of the nation’s traditional blueblood programs and put it back on the national map — for good.

“This is one of the premier schools, basketball schools in the entire country,” DeVries said. “I enjoyed my time when I was a grad assistant at Creighton all the way up through assistants and head coaching, and now I’m looking forward to this next step. I believe we can do some special things here, so I’m really excited.”

So are Hoosiers fans, who have become more accustomed to mediocre records and hopeful of NCAA tourney bids over the past two decades.

Indiana missed the 68-team field in each of Mike Woodson’s final two seasons and landed in the First Four in the first of his four seasons. As a result, Woodson and the athletic department decided in February this would be his final season coaching his alma mater.

But the problems predate Woodson’s arrival in 2021-22: Indiana missed the tourney five straight times from 2017-21. The Hoosiers haven’t been to the Sweet 16 since 2016 and haven’t gone any deeper since playing for the 2002 national championship.

They believe that DeVries, the seventh coach since the late Bob Knight was fired, will be the one to restore Indiana’s glory.

“He’s a proven evaluator and developer of players,” athletic director Scott Dolson said. “We wanted to make certain that we had a modern playing style. We have to have a head coach that understands where things are going. It was really important to us. We wanted someone that really wanted to be here. We felt we were in recruiting mode, but at the same time we wanted someone that really was recruiting us.”

All DeVries must do now is deliver on the promises with the results Indiana has been seeking, pretty much since the moment of Knight’s firing.

“The chance to lead one of the biggest brands in college basketball was something I could not pass up,” DeVries said. “We have an administration here that is 100% in alignment with navigating through this whole new era of college athletics, from the top down. There’s no doubt that there’s an extreme commitment to making sure we are on the upper edge of all of that. There are resources available here that are among the best in the entire country.”

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