Submitted photo New Mountaineer basketball coach Darian DeVries won 20 or more games in each of his six seasons at Drake.

MORGANTOWN — What type of background does it require to be a successful Big 12 basketball coach and does that background fit West Virginia’s Darian DeVries?

Profiling the coaches uncovers a number of consistencies, so let’s take a look at it.

The world in college athletics is changing its face through expansion, which should broaden the horizons in the Big 12 as it moves both westward and eastward from it’s roots that lie in the heartland of America and into Texas and Oklahoma.

The expansion into the Four Corner states and into Florida and Ohio, with more expansion to come next year and even more in the future the power of the athletically prominent collegiate institutions widening the gap, might change the profile of coaches.

This may even be hastened by the NIL rules and portals as the relationships between coaches and players become more strained

To wit, The Associated Press reported that coach Danny Hurley of No. 1 Connecticut was worrying that highly recruited Jaylin Stewart, whose playing time at No. 1 Connecticut before he hit a key 3-point shot to help beat Marquette, could be heading for the transfer portal.

“We’ve just pleaded with him on a daily basis,” Hurley said after the game. “You know, that portal is calling and there’s a lot of tampering going on.”

This is not the era that Bobby Knight, Dean Smith, Jim Boeheim and even Bob Huggins have operated and thrived in.

DeVries is in his way a new breed coach with an old breed background, the kind of background you see throughout the conference now.

He has the midwestern roots that most of the Big 12 coaches have, as well as a long, successful stay as an assistant coach at one school, Creighton, learning his basketball during 17 years under Dana Altman and Greg McDermott.

With such roots, he is a down-to-earth sort of guy who is able to separate basketball and home life.

Tom Shatel, a sports columnist at the Omaha World-Herald, says he knew him when he was an assistant at Creighton.

“He worked his way up from grad assistant to top assistant, and he’s hard-nosed and tough but also great with players,” Shatel said, sounding as if he were speaking about Bob Huggins. “He’s also a great family man, the kind of guy you see at his kids’ games or out picking up dinner on his way home.”

And that family part of it is important because his son, Tucker, was the Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year last year and is expected to transfer to WVU to continue playing for his father.

DeVries is, as are most of the conference coaches, experienced with 23 years in the business, six of them very successful at mid-major Drake, where he won 20 or more games in each of his six seasons there.

He seems to be very much in the mode of what seems to be the kind of coach WVU athletic director Wren Baker looks for, a lot like Grant McCaslin of Texas Tech, whom Baker hired at North Texas when he was athletic director there, and a lot like Mark Kellogg, who took the WVU women’s team into the NCAA Tournament this year.

Mid-major head coaching experience also seems to be almost a requirement for a Big 12 coach.

Take a look and you see Bill Self of Kansas and the dean of Big 12 coaches was at Oral Roberts, Scott Drew of Baylor was at Valparaiso, Porter Moser of Oklahoma at Loyola of Illinois, Rodney Terry of Texas at UTEP and Fresno, Mike Pope at Utah Valley, Wes Miller of Cincinnati at UNC-Greensboro, TJ Otzelberger of Iowa State at UNLV.

Other than Self, they don’t have the glare of the bright lights you find throughout other conferences.

Clearly at the head of the class is Self and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, who is in just his first year with Houston in the Big 12, although he did spend a stint coaching at Oklahoma.

Self has won 795 career games and Sampson 762.

There are a few exceptions to the generalities that seem to engulf most Big 12 coaches.

Johnny Dawkins, who came into the league this year with UCF, is a one true superstar player coaching in the Big 12, having won not only the Naismith National Player of the Year Award but gone on to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

Scott Drew at Baylor is the son of Homer Drew, who coached his way into the Hall of Fame at Valparaiso, and he is the brother of Grand Canyon coach Boyce Drew.

TCU’s Jamie Dixon’s coaching roots lie about as far west as you can go, having coached at Hawaii, but he made his name as a major college coach at Pitt, having engaged in intense battles with Huggins.