The new guy

 So, then: Darian DeVries.

"Who?" you're saying now.

Haha. Very funny. Or not, I don't know.

Or not, because, OK, the new guy about to be dropped into the vat of boiling oil that is the Indiana  University basketball job is not the sexy hire. He is not your name guy, your marquee guy, your Bruce Pearl or Chris Beard or Brad Stevens ("Brad Stevens!" breathes Candy Stripe Nation, genuflecting), or anyone else who wasn't going to come to Bloomington no matter how often people tossed their names around.

Darian DeVries?

This is Archie Miller all over again.

OK, so no. Or probably not. Or, you know, just name-recognition-wise.

Who he is, you're tempted to say, is just another guy whose team didn't make Da Tournament, but that's just mean. First of all, West Virginia should have gotten in. They went 19-13 in DeVries first season after he inherited the 9-23 crash site left behind by the whole Bob Huggins drama. They finished just .500 in the Big 12 (10-10), but this season they beat Kansas and they beat Iowa State and they beat Gonzaga and Arizona -- all of whom did make the big show. 

So there's that.

There's also this: He's only 49, but he's been doing this awhile.

He served 17 years as an assistant under the tutelage of Dana Altman and Greg McDermott at Creighton -- two guys you have heard of -- and then got the big chair at Drake. Took over a stubbornly beige program that had won 20 games just once in 47 years, and wrung 20-win seasons out of it six years in a row. Last season the Bulldogs won 28 games, tying a school record, and made Da Tournament for the second year in a row as a 10-seed.

In the end, DeVries left Drake having won 150 games in six seasons, losing just 15 games across the last two. He'll likely come to Bloomington with his son, 6-7 guard Tucker DeVries, who was the linchpin of those Drake teams and might be the best player on the Indiana squad at least until all the transfer portal dust settles.

So, then: Darian DeVries.

Pretty resume. Lots of time in the trenches. Knows how to negotiate the bizarre landscape of college buckets these days. Might give you pause because of the circumstances -- what kind of person pledges to rebuild a program and then says, oops, just kidding, Indiana job's open? -- but maybe that's just me. 

Bidness is bidness, as they say. I get it. And there's hardly any bidness like the college basketball bidness these days.

Darian DeVries?

Yeah, he's no name guy. But neither was another guy who came to Indiana from Army 55 years ago.

His name was Bob Knight.

"Who?" everyone said then.

Exactly.