I'm sure I'm strongly biased in my thinking that Kermit in all likelihood will be remaining a Blue Raider. Despite my bias, he and his family seem to be at home in Murfreesboro which counts for a lot. Another reason, his stage in life. If Kermit was younger, say in his 30s, I would expect that he would be gone at the first call from a P5 program. After 15 years of making MTSU and Murfreesboro home, he has gone through the growing pains of developing the program into a continuing successful program with potential for even further growth and and success. As Kermit has started to promote, he rightly sees the program starting to break through into being a nationally recognized program. How did he put it the other day? MT is about at the point of being a Gonzaga or Butler of 10 years ago. Growing the program into tons of success is tremendously challenging, but it has to be incredibly rewarding in building that success.
As most would likely agree, there is the variable of one of a handful of top programs possibly offering millions upon millions of dollars to coach one of those limited handful of national basketball powerhouses. If that situation were to come along, that would likely be a situation to where all bets are off. Most people would jump at that.
With all of that said, VCU and Shaka Smart comes to mind. The one difference, Shaka Smart seems quite a bit younger, a different stage of life than Kermit. Smart turned down a pretty big offer while at VCU from Illinois or some Big 10 school I think it was. People were impressed and excited that he turned down big bucks and a P5 program to stay with the upstart VCU program where he was having tons of success. That lasted a few more years, Then one of those small handful of schools came along and made an offer that very few other programs in the nation could match. Shaka Smart promptly took that Texas job. Here it is a couple of years later, and the Shaka Smart led Longhorns just finished dead last in the Big 12 with twice as many losses as wins in his overall record on the season. Don't you know that there is a lot of pressure with all that money at that job!
My point in all of this is that Kermit has finally built the MT program into something to where he has a good thing going. He's put in the work and years of growing pains to put in his system and develop his winning culture. At what point does that factor as something significant that would be hard to walk away from. Especially when the chances are one of these top dollar powerhouse P5 programs will likely expect a new coach to institute that system and culture of success in a few short years before the knives come out to get rid of that head coach quickly. I guess I'm saying at a certain point in life when you have a lot of good things going, how much money is it really worth to start over again especially in a pressure cooker? Very few people would knock a head coach for jumping at a chance for that kind of money, no doubt. Short of astronomical contract dollars at a dream program, some coaches who have been around long enough might stay for the less money but overall quality circumstances. Additionally, it is likely that the current AD will fork out increasing amounts of pay as the the program reaps the benefits of continued and new levels of success.
In summary, I'm not all that concerned about Kermit jumping ship unless one of a few dream type jobs with many millions of cash come along offering. The amount of those type of programs would depend on what Kermit would consider a "dream job." Apparently, he has roots at Miss St. Just saying that as a type of example. Maybe a dream job would be one of the programs such as Kentucky, UCLA, Oklahoma, you know, those type of programs. Other than some huge offer like that, I'm not all that concerned about Kermit up and leaving for just any ole P5 program that might offer a fairly substantial pay raise. At his stage of life and being a family man, I suspect money is a part of the equation but is not the equation.
