Most successful current head coaches aren't viable candidates. Outside of the P5 and AAC, there are very few universities that have a decent football program and pay MBB coaches large salaries. The absolute ceiling seems to be around 750k, and that's a pretty far outlier. If JMU is ambitious, I'd say the absolute highest they offer would be around 500k, which does seemingly leave a good amount of successful current head coaches, but if you check current contracts and take a look at all these buyouts, it's hard to believe that JMU is going to spend 2 million year one for any coach(Rowe buyout + new coach buyout + new salary = ~2 million). Maybe I'm completely wrong, but that's how I'm thinking about it right now. Maybe paying Rowe 260k for one more year was just enough to get over the hump.

There's a lot on here about "don't go cheap", but that's a pretty vague way to go about it. I'm curious what the actual salary expectation people on here have.