Ideally, the next University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's basketball coach not only will be successful but stay around for a while.
The reality is that likely won't be the case.
Success leads to opportunities, typically higher-paying ones, in leagues where there are multiple bids to the NCAA tournament. The Mocs' two most recent coaches - Will Wade and Matt McCall - left for jobs in the typically multi-bid Atlantic 10 Conference, with Wade going to Virginia Commonwealth in 2015 and McCall heading this week to Massachusetts.
And now UTC vice chancellor and athletic director David Blackburn has the task again of replacing a head coach, and replacing him with somebody to fit the team's personnel.
And that's where things get cloudy.
The Mocs are expected to have eight scholarship players returning next season. Forwards Chuck Ester, who missed last season with a torn ACL, and Trayvond Massenburg, who appeared in 17 games in a reserve role, would be the only seniors. Also expected to be back are juniors Makinde London and Nat Dixon, sophomores Rodney Chatman and Makale Foreman and redshirt freshman David Jean-Baptiste.
Iowa transfer Andrew Fleming sat last season out and will have three seasons remaining.
Four players have been signed for next season: prep guards Jalen Crutcher and Terry Nolan Jr., 6-foot-7 Demarcus Mitchell and junior college forward Joan Duran. The new coach will have some work to do, with the April signing period approaching and some obvious holes needing to be filled.
"We're going to be better than people think. We're just going to be young," Blackburn said. "That will lead us to a very important growth that maybe we've not seen in many, many years.
"I think we're staged for it."
Blackburn has stated he wants to "move quickly" on hiring a new coach and now is in the Phoenix area, the site of the NCAA Final Four. In his time, he's figured out what good looks like in a college basketball coach, with 88 wins from the program in his four seasons since taking over as the athletic director. This could be his biggest task, though: finding a coach who has connections to make quality additions to the roster - possibly through the junior college ranks - and still can develop the talent that remains in Chattanooga. The rebuild could take a year or two - or three.
"It's important for this one to be someone that may can camp out here for three, four years," Blackburn said. "If they do well, they're going to get picked, that's just the nature of the beast. Continuity is what we're after, but when you hire good people, sometimes that doesn't happen. I'd always rather err on the side of a really good coach that we may lose in hopes that we can replace them with a really good coach, as opposed to an average coach that may be here eight years, and we be average.
"I don't like average: It gets you nowhere and it gets the least amount out of the students academically and athletically. And oh, by the way, it will get me fired, frankly. So I want to be competitive."