Why all the fuss?Because Wilder wants to stay put

To be clear, Bobby Wilder's 10-year extension to coach football at Old Dominion isn't one of those Pete Gillen, Charlie Weis deals that leaves the university owing millions if and when a tenure goes horribly wrong.

In the past decade, Virginia and Notre Dame inexplicably extended their basketball and football coaches for big dollars over 10 years and, yep, wound up paying princely buyouts upon their early dismissals.

Nonetheless, the crazy-long extension still remains a weapon in college sports' arms race. Just in 2011, Richmond basketball coach Chris Mooney signed for 10 years, as did Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald.

Butler's basketball coach, Brad Stevens, got a dozen years. Even Virginia Commonwealth panicked after Shaka Smart got the Rams to the Final Four, and now Smart's in the school's pocket for eight years at $1.2 million per.

But Monday's announcement of Wilder's big deal wasn't about the traditional inking of a large, bottom-line number. Athletic director Wood Selig said there will be no change in Wilder's $200,000 state salary - a raise in this economy would be bad form, the parties said - but he'll have a slew of new privately funded incentives to chase.

Instead, Monday was more about making a public spectacle of Wilder's wish to stay at ODU. About Selig's desire to keep the money train Wilder created out of thin air churning.

And about alerting fans and recruits - and as Wilder subtly interjected, "the teams that we compete against" - they'll have Wilder's irrepressibly offensive exhibitions around for a while.

Now, for a defense, Job One in recruiting, the coach said.

This hardly guarantees Wilder will be at ODU in 2021 when he's 57. His buyout to the school is unchanged at $450,000. And if some way-bigger football spender is smitten enough with what Wilder has done at ODU to open a vault and ask him to do it again, maybe he'd go.

Or maybe he wouldn't.

Wilder is a rare football-coaching homebody who has worked in three places in 24 years, including 17 years as an assistant at Maine, his alma mater. And he volunteered more than once Monday that Norfolk is where he, his wife and two boys want to be.

Yet in answer to a question, Wilder acknowledged he, like any coach, naturally thinks of coaching at the "highest possible level." But what if he could do that at ODU - that is, coach at the Bowl Championship Series level, bless its cold, calculating heart?

You see what could be between the lines of Monday's announcement, right?

There's no way of knowing exactly how much upheaval the next decade will bring to "big-time" college football, except that it will probably be staggering. It's no stretch at all to imagine the current landscape bulldozed and rebuilt in a way that includes an ambitious, well-supported, football-dazed school like ODU or, say, James Madison on that new, big-boy frontier.

Wilder said he and Selig have not recently had that specific conversation about raising ODU's game in the most literal sense. But such hope and dream openly percolates at ODU. And Wilder's suggestion that, "I think that's something that is a possibility in the future of this program," will only stir the frenzy.

For now, though, Wilder's baby still has more immediate heights to climb as its "proud" and "humbled" father strides alongside, as ever clap-clap-clapping in encouragement.

Said Wilder, for the benefit of friends and foes, "I think my track record shows when I get somewhere I'm happy, I stay."

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com