Job Opportunity Dilemma: Love Location or Love Cash. WWYD?

There’s an odd sorrow as I wake up today and, of course, I’m leaning into it.

Watching the sun come up from my happy place here as I try and think what else I will need to do (pictures off my work phone, etc) in case they give me the boot today.

We should have been able to make it work. I put in the hours. Really learned the market. That pains me a lot that it didn’t work. I’m a terrible loser but this year has made me “okay” with going out and losing by 20 every night. It’s weird.


To carry the basketball metaphor over again, I couldn’t turn USC around. Didn’t even really get the chance as ownership cut our legs off last year with a radical shift in philosophy. To paraphrase @PCLoadLetter, with my airtime gone and my pay cut, I am dead coach walking here. More chest pains last night at work.

Yet I also feel incredibly fortunate.

The new gig (Tulsa/Colorado State/Tulane/Dayton) has been nicer to me than anyone I’ve ever interviewed with. They’re paying me more than USC did. They agreed to a start date further out so I can finish out the season here but they also said I can start up to a month earlier if I get booted today. I may take them up on that.

It’s clear they think I’m a long-term fix. At least as much as one can be in this line of work.

I won a lot of games at “Ball State” before taking the USC job. More than anything else, I’m forever appreciative “Tulsa” sees the 238-145 mark I put up at Ball State and not the 22-37 hell the two years at USC have been.

I knew USC was a risk when I took it because there was a revolving-door quality to it. But it also put me in position to land at a far better gig than I had at Ball State. LFG.

 

Congrats on your new, happier mid-major life.

 

Mark Few has done pretty damn well for himself over the past 25 years being atop the mid-major mountain. Enjoy the reduced pressure and increased support you'll get from the brass.

 

... needs to have won at least one title by now, if not two or three.

 

Better to be happy and have a better life at a mid-major, and likely be far more appreciated, than miserable with chest pains at The Big. Good luck with the move and new chapter.

 

@exmediahack, we need the old school gamer play by play of your final day.

 

Got rained out. Boss left before I got there.

 

I am way late to the party, but if you love where you presently live, don't sell your house. Move back in 10 years or when you're ready to get out of the business. Sounds as if the cost of living is cheaper at your new gig and pays more. That's a good combination.

I lived in North Nowhere for almost nine years and got to like it. Your new locale may surprise you; I know it's cliche but there are good people and good things to do everywhere, if you go into it with a great attitude.

 

So, Tuesday?

 

That is absolutely the plan on renting out my current place. Value will only go up.

 

There's only one house that appears occasionally in my dreams ... the house we sold when we moved here. I was thrilled to be out of that job/area, and keeping the house and being a landlord wouldn't have been in the cards even had I wanted to do so. But apparently that house (in some way) got its hooks in me somewhere deep in my psyche. Every few months I'll have a dream in which I'm squatting there even though I know it's not mine. The owners will be heavy into "WTF?" mode, and I'll be saying, "Oh, it's OK, I used to own this house!"