Seven BCS-level jobs in college basketball opened this offseason for reasons that spanned from terminations (Illinois) to retirements (Mississippi State). But they're all filled now. And what we were reminded once again from this annual carousel is that convincing a safe and content BCS coach to voluntarily leave one school for another is among the sport's most difficult tasks.

It almost never happens.

The proof is in the numbers.

Just one power-conference school was able to hire a power-conference head coach this offseason, and the only reason it happened is because said power-conference head coach, Frank Martin, decided he'd rather take what is a historically bad SEC job and try to compete with John Calipari and Billy Donovan than work at Kansas State another day under athletic director John Currie. I realize Martin has denied this in the sense that he's claimed there was never a real rift between him and his old boss. But that's just Martin taking the high road. The truth is that he and Currie went together about as well as Amar'e Stoudemire and glass. So while it's true that moving from Manhattan (Kansas) to Columbia (South Carolina) gets Martin and his wife closer to their East Coast roots, it's also true that Martin would still likely be KSU's coach if he didn't spend the past year frustrated by his buttoned-up AD.

But whatever.

I'm not here to write about Frank Martin.

I'm here to once and for all convince ADs and fans that the key to your school not looking silly during a coaching search is to set reasonable sights on one of these three things:

1. Coaches who are out of coaching 2. BCS assistants 3. Non-BCS head coaches not named Mark Few, Brad Stevens or Shaka Smart.

If you're not shopping for a coach on one of those aisles you're almost certainly shopping on the wrong aisle and wasting time. For proof consider that just five of the 32 BCS-level jobs that have opened over the past three years were filled with BCS-level head coaches, and that none of them was filled by Few, Stevens or Smart. The only BCS-level head coaches who have voluntarily changed jobs over the past three offseasons are Martin (KSU to South Carolina), Mike Anderson (Missouri to Arkansas), Oliver Purnell (Clemson to DePaul), Frank Haith (Miami to Missouri) and Mark Turgeon (Texas A&M to Maryland), and Turgeon is the lone person of the group who left purely for basketball reasons.

Martin hated his boss. Anderson wanted to move back to Arkansas. Haith probably only had one year left at Miami. And Purnell, well, he just decided to take a big check and the city of Chicago rather than remain in South Carolina, and, with all due respect to South Carolina, who could blame him? Chicago is a great place to live. A big check makes it better. And at DePaul these days, nobody cares if you lose in the NCAA tournament (or if you even make it). Pressure is nonexistent, which must be nice for a man approaching 60 years old. OP is living the good life. We should all be so lucky.

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Hokies' hire a reminder that ADs need to be realistic with coaching search