Can new coach Paul Mills save Wichita State Shocker basketball? | Opinion

Wichita State University has their man — Paul Mills was officially introduced Thursday as the next Shocker basketball coach.

He comes to Doo Dah from the mythical land of Oklahoma, where he led Oral Roberts University to unprecedented success on the hardwood.

The fervent hope around here is he’ll lead Wichita State back to what it got used to being in the Gregg Marshall era, when the Shockers were perennial NCAA tournament participants and occasionally took a thrilling Cinderella run through the brackets.

Mills is kind of like a cleaned-up version of Marshall.

They both built successful programs around finding players who were overlooked by college basketball’s elite schools, keeping them together for years, and teaching them team play that could challenge the blue bloods on the court.

In Mills’ case, that came without the demeaning verbal and physical abuse that Marshall heaped on his players, which forced WSU to cut him loose with nothing but a six-year, $7.75 million parachute to soften the fall.

Mills had a great six-year run at Oral Roberts, where he put together a team that went to the Sweet 16 last year and put up 30 wins this season.

But his new job is going to be a challenge. We live in interesting times for college basketball, now that players can be paid for use of their “name, image and likeness.”

NIL was envisioned as a way for most players to pick up a few extra bucks by selling autographs or being in ads for local car washes, mattress stores, or whatever.

But it’s turned into the monster that is not-so-slowly eating college basketball whole.

Rich boosters now hold bidding wars for top high school prospects, and they can poach players from NIL-poorer schools through the “transfer portal,” which is essentially a vast online meat market.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that was a big factor in the downfall of Mills’ immediate predecessor, Isaac Brown.

The ink wasn’t dry on Brown’s walking papers before Armchair Strategies, the NIL “collective” that crowdfunds payments to Wichita State players, announced that it’s landed six-figure commitments from boosters to pay the next generation of “student athletes.”

Assuming that’s true — there’s no way to check because the donations and payments are all kept secret — what that would tell you is that unidentified wealthy donors now control who our public university hires and fires.

But setting that aside, Mills is about to undergo some culture shock.

Oral Roberts University, founded by and named for the pioneering televangelist, is a very, very, very Christian school — drinking, swearing, even dancing can get a student rung up on disciplinary charges.

From a basketball perspective, that has advantages and disadvantages.

On the downside, it prevents coaches from recruiting talented players with red flags on their personal conduct, or those who just want to let loose a little when they get away from home.

On the upside, it’s easier for coaches to keep their players together, because parents who send their kids to Oral Roberts very much want them in that kind of strict environment, where they’re more sheltered from the temptations of being a big man on campus.

I went to a game there once and it was the strangest basketball experience I ever had.

I was in Tulsa for 11 weeks in 1999, covering a trial alleging that Koch Industries stole oil from federal lands and federally protected tribes. Spoiler: they did.

One day, I was reading the Tulsa World and noticed that my alma mater, Cal State Northridge, was playing Oral Roberts that night.

So I went to the game.

Their arena was like a TV megachurch adapted for basketball.

I got some Dippin’ Dots in the concourse and went to my seat. I remember the Dippin’ Dots because that’s what they sold in lieu of beer, which to this day is not allowed at their games.

The Oral Roberts players took the floor looking like a clean-cut church youth group; the players from Northridge were a rougher looking bunch, lots of tattoos and in some cases, words shaved into their hair.

There was a lot of pearl clutching in the stands: “Where did they get this team?” “They look like a bunch of thugs,” etc. etc.

Finally I stood up and announced to the people around me that I went there, which calmed the chatter somewhat.

Northridge has never been a powerhouse, but we crushed Oral Roberts that night. And boy, did it feel good.

When Mills gets to Wichita State, he’s going to find out that it’s much more like Northridge than Oral Roberts.

It’s a larger school in an urban setting with lots of commuter students living off campus. And while it’s not the den of sin and iniquity that Oral Roberts fans thought my school was, the students there do like to party a bit.

Another similarity is that both schools have to recruit in the shadow of a storied basketball juggernaut — at Northridge, it’s UCLA; at Wichita State, it’s the University of Kansas.

So here’s hoping that Mills is the right man to take Shocker basketball back to where it used to be.

This community has invested millions to bring him here — including Marshall’s $7.75 million, the $4 million left on Brown’s contract, plus Mills’ as-yet-undisclosed salary and an also-undisclosed payment to Oral Roberts to buy out the remaining six years of Mills’ contract there.

With all the variables in play with NIL, the portal and the boosters, Wichita State basketball may get better or it may get worse.

But it will get interesting.