Between The Eers: Will Wren Baker Wait?
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:10 Good Wednesday morning everyone, Scott Callen here on Between the Ears and
00:14 more talk about the West Virginia men's basketball coaching search.
00:18 We're not gonna get into the names as I've already mentioned before.
00:22 But this is more about strategy.
00:24 How does Ryan Baker go about it?
00:26 What's it look like?
00:27 The timing of it?
00:29 That's my thoughts on it.
00:30 We're gonna get to that here in just a second.
00:32 Make sure you hit subscribe and give us a like on our YouTube page at
00:36 Mountain Ears Now, and give us a follow on X at the same handle.
00:41 So, at this point, it seems rather inevitable that West Virginia
00:47 will go from the outside or look to the outside to find its next permanent head
00:52 coach, Josh Eilert, sitting at nine and 19 on the year.
00:57 Again, we talked about it already this week.
00:59 It's a tough situation for him to be in, and
01:03 really one that he never had much of a chance to succeed in.
01:06 That's just the hand he was dealt.
01:09 But unfortunately, even with that, you gotta take into account,
01:16 this is a big time decision here coming up for Ryan Baker.
01:20 And he can't afford to mess this one up.
01:23 And knowing what we know about Ren, he's a damn good basketball mind.
01:31 He's hired Grant McCaslin, he's hired Mark Kellogg.
01:37 He knows how to find basketball coaches.
01:40 And I think from what we've seen just in his recent hires,
01:46 he's actually hired Mark Kellogg twice.
01:50 But you should trust what Ren Baker's about to do.
01:55 I don't know what it is, and we're all gonna have our opinion on it.
02:01 Without a doubt, I may not like it.
02:05 I may think it's the most questionable coaching hire that could have been made.
02:12 But I'm still probably gonna trust that the guys know what he's doing here and
02:18 he's gonna figure it out because it's been his track record.
02:22 He's hit on just about every single coaching hire that he's made,
02:26 particularly with basketball.
02:29 So I'm not really gonna question it too much.
02:34 I'll give my personal opinion when it does happen.
02:36 And as I stated earlier, once the season ends, I'll start looking into
02:44 the candidates, the rumored candidates, some names I will put on the list.
02:48 So we'll get into that once the season ends.
02:50 But for now, we're gonna talk about the strategy, what it needs to look like,
02:55 what this coaching search will look like in terms of a timeline.
03:01 I wouldn't expect anything until also the season ends.
03:10 I think Ren will wait, as he has mentioned multiple times,
03:16 mostly dating back to last summer, that it was only fair to Josh and for
03:23 the kids in the program and the other assistants on the staff that he was gonna
03:27 give them this year, and at the end of the year that he would do his evaluation and
03:32 they would make their decision in which direction they will go.
03:34 I think that Ren is a man of his word, despite the poor play, the record,
03:41 the season hasn't turned out to be what everyone expected.
03:44 Or maybe not expected, but had hoped that he's still gonna give Josh that time.
03:50 And I believe that at the end of the season,
03:53 he's also still gonna give Josh an opportunity to interview for the job.
03:56 Whether he views him as a serious candidate or not, I don't know, but
04:02 it's worth at least giving him that opportunity.
04:04 And again, we can sit here and agree and disagree on whether or
04:11 not Josh Shiler is a head coach material or not.
04:14 But again, as I stated before, the man was handed a crap show, okay?
04:23 No one was gonna succeed in that.
04:24 So I'm not saying he would in a normal setting,
04:31 but he at least deserves the opportunity to interview.
04:36 Again, whether he makes it serious or not, I don't know.
04:40 But I do think he'll give him to the end of the year.
04:43 I see schools out there, I think Ohio State is one of them that's reportedly
04:49 already kind of talking with some coaches, specifically Dusty May at Florida Atlantic,
04:55 which I know has been a name that has popped up around these parts.
05:00 But I don't see that happening.
05:05 You might see some names pop up, as we've already seen from that ESPN article.
05:10 But I don't think there's gonna be any actual talks going on right now.
05:16 Could be wrong, but I would be very surprised.
05:21 I think that's gonna be something that, again,
05:23 gets tabled till the end of the season.
05:26 And then they go through that search.
05:28 How long will the search take?
05:30 Not long.
05:32 I would be willing to bet that within,
05:37 I'll give myself a little bit of cushion here.
05:41 At max, two weeks after the end of the regular, or
05:47 not the end of the regular season, but the end of the final game,
05:50 they'll have a coach in place.
05:53 I'd probably even lean closer to a week.
05:55 The reason I say that is, well, I mean, he's had a year.
06:00 So if you go through that accelerated search a year ago,
06:05 you probably have a good feeling as to who those coaches are gonna be that you feel
06:10 are fit for the job.
06:12 He put out some fiddlers last year, aimed high, went for
06:18 some Hall of Fame type names, looked at some of the guys that are on the up and up.
06:22 And then throughout the year, he added names to that list.
06:26 So I think by now, you have a pretty good ideas as to who that guy is going to be,
06:33 if it's not Josh or two or three guys.
06:37 You get into the round of interviews, second round of interviews, and
06:41 then you make your decision.
06:42 It's not gonna be a long process.
06:45 It's not like you're firing your coach at the end of the season, and
06:48 you have to start figuring out, okay, who might be available, who might not be?
06:54 Who do we feel like could be a fit, who could turn this thing around?
06:59 In West Virginia's case, they're almost at an advantage because they've known
07:04 about this for about a year.
07:06 Even Ohio State, even though they made their change mid-season,
07:09 they're still gonna have to go through this on the fly.
07:13 Even if they end up with Dusty Mays, some people are indicating.
07:22 I don't know, I don't view that as Ohio State really have an advantage.
07:27 If they know their guy, they know their guy.
07:29 But West Virginia, in terms of the cycle, I think still has the advantage
07:34 because they know their interest level in Dusty May, if there is any.
07:41 And if there's a serious amount of interest level, and that's their guy,
07:47 they have to get him, we might see some wheels start to turn.
07:52 Might see some momentum pick up, and
07:54 maybe Ren doesn't wait to the end of the season.
07:57 I don't think that's the case.
07:58 I think we will get to the end of the year before this happens.
08:00 But you never know.
08:03 So I think, again, they're gonna have the advantage because they have the year or
08:10 so of gathering information.
08:14 And I'll put this out there too.
08:17 As I mentioned before this week, it's not going to be Bob Huggins.
08:24 And I don't think it's going to be a big,
08:27 big time name that everybody knows, like, I don't know,
08:32 like a John Beeline, which has been thrown out there, or a Jay Wright,
08:38 or Roy Williams, like the rumors circulated about last year.
08:43 How truthful those were, I don't know.
08:46 I mean, it was an accelerated search, and maybe there was some truth to it.
08:52 I don't know.
08:53 But I don't think that that was really ever gonna happen.
08:58 So it's going to be somebody that's on the up and up.
09:02 It's just a matter of which guy they feel like that could be the best fit for
09:07 the job, whether that's Dusty May, whether that's somebody else.
09:11 Again, I'm not gonna get into my opinions of all that just yet, but
09:14 this will be a quick process.
09:17 And I think it has to be too, because of the transfer report.
09:23 You can't go back and have a similar offseason that you did last year,
09:27 where you're losing a bunch of guys.
09:29 All of a sudden, you're piecing the team together on the fly.
09:32 You can't have that.
09:33 You gotta get your coach and his staff in here in place.
09:37 And who knows, maybe Josh Eiler somehow finds a way to stick around.
09:43 And maybe that keeps some of the pieces here.
09:48 But then again, it's kind of unlikely that those things usually happen like that.
09:55 Where you have a new staff come in and the interim sticks around,
09:58 goes back to his previous role or just a role on the staff.
10:02 Because you're worried about the pool of power, right?
10:07 You don't know how the kids view it.
10:09 You don't know if they still lean to Josh in certain settings.
10:13 So I don't know.
10:15 That's a whole different topic for another day.
10:18 But I do think you get the staff in here within a week or two at most,
10:25 and you're probably able to keep the majority of the guys that are on your roster.
10:29 At the end of the day, if you're not able to, it's not the end of the world, right?
10:33 I mean, this is a team that did go 9-19 through the first 28 games.
10:38 So there's going to be a lot of portal options, as there always is.
10:43 There could be some guys that they're going to bring along with them.
10:45 And I think you got to view 24-25 as a transition year.
10:52 Hey, it's not going to be all sunshines and rainbows in year one.
10:54 Some places it's been like that.
10:58 I don't think that's the case here.
11:02 If Kirk Creasa and some other guys are willing to stick around,
11:05 maybe it makes it a little bit smoother for transition.
11:09 I wouldn't bank on it.
11:11 But by year two, we should start to really see this hire paying off.
11:17 So that'll do it for me here today.
11:22 Not a whole lot going on still in the offseason for football.
11:25 That'll be ramping up here in a couple of weeks.
11:27 So we'll dive more into football.
11:29 We'll get Eugene Napoleon back on.
11:31 We'll get Chris back on and maybe some others as well.
11:36 But make sure you hit that subscribe button, like I said, on YouTube.
11:39 I'm out in years now.
11:40 Give us a like and a follow on X at the same handle.
11:43 We'll be back here tomorrow morning for another episode.
11:47 (MUSIC)
11:50 (MUSIC)