Ross Hodge Discusses Crown Bid, Transfer Portal, and Postseason Mindset Ahead of Stanford Matchup

The West Virginia Mountaineers (18-14) are heading to Las Vegas to compete in the College Basketball Crown and will take on the Stanford Cardinal (20-12) Thursday night. Tip-off is set for 8:00 p.m. EST and will be televised on FS1.

West Virginia University head coach Ross Hodge met with the media and gave his thoughts on the Mountaineers postseason bid, building for next season, and more.

Incentive to play in the College Basketball Crown

I think anytime you get a chance to put on a college uniform, you know, and obviously something we've talked about with our seniors and they could all tell you just how fast those four years really do go. And so anytime you get a chance to represent your university, in our case a state themselves, you got to take advantage of those opportunities. And us specifically, with the Big 12's partnership with Fox - that like if anyone was kind of wondering, well, why the Crown and not the NIT? So, the partnership we have with Fox and the Big 12, that's what kind of is contractually obligated. If you're the two top teams that don't play in the NCAA tournament, you go to the crown.

Aside from that, for our group in particular, they really do enjoy each other, our guys, and they enjoy playing basketball. So it makes it an enjoyable experience to keep playing.

Building a roster for the 2026-27 season with the transfer portal opening April 7

They made some adjustments to that cause coaches complained about that a little bit, the timing of the portal and that's why now the portal officially opens the Tuesday after the national championship game as you guys probably - anyone that has a pulse is aware that the portal's the portal's always kind of open. Let's be honest. But the biggest difference is if you were still playing a year ago, you could be sacrificing time where you could have people on official visits or you could go be physically in person with people that are already in the portal. And now, other than just kind of collecting names and seeing who's in it and those type of situations, you're not losing the opportunity to have somebody come visit because you're still playing.

The long layoff between the regular season and the opening round of the Crown

The first practice back that we had Tony Caridi and those guys, they come to practice a lot, but he's like, "Hey
man, this is your first bowl game," and he and he wasn't wrong. It was very similar to what football does with their bowl games, where they may have a month or even more than that. And so, I think what this situation allows you to do more than others is you did get a chance to get away a little bit. Our guys were able to have a true spring break and coming off the conference tournament, everybody was to kind of get away from each other for a little bit. A lot of our guys ended up spending time with each other in spring break and went and did that.

Then you're coming off that that first week back, you're really just trying to get their legs back under them, get in a little bit of conditioning, get back to playing, and now you lead into the to the Stanford game, which is on Thursday. So, it's not like you sat around for two weeks really just solely prepping and focusing on them. A lot of it was just focus on yourself and just get back to playing basketball.

Point guard Amir Jenkins' length of recovery

I mean, don't really know. It's like kind of one of those things you won't really know until they get in there and open it up. He's scheduled to have surgery on his left shoulder Wednesday - this Wednesday and then they'll kind of see how that goes and then I'll have to have surgery on the right one. So, there's not really like a long-term prognosis right now until you actually get in there and perform the surgeries.