Just piecing together a ton of stuff, this seems to me to be the scenario that fits the best:
Rhule was the #1 choice at least a couple of weeks ago. He was even here at least once, probably twice. The reports of the BoR meeting was not an official meeting but Trev letting them know that he thought he found his guy and running the terms by therm. Trev was trying to get a deal done, but Carolina threw a fit. My guess is it was in the $6-7M range and they wanted it to be basically the whole $10M or they weren’t going to let it fly.
Trev didn’t feel he should go any higher so that’s when the reports came out that he turned us down. And that story morphed into the low-ball offer reports and not wanting to pay assistants. And Trev started to move on to his next choices. And that led to Trev’s comments about being good stewards of the resources he had.
But then a couple of the big-money boosters stepped in and said if that’s really who Trev wanted, we needed to pay what it took to get him here. So they ponied up some extra cash - or pledged to contribute to something else - and that got us back in the picture.
The $9.2-ish million was enough to make Carolina happy and now we’re set for an announcement Saturday or Sunday with a press conference Sunday or Monday.
And once we had Rhule on the hook the other guys we had lined up as next choices - Liepold, DeBoer, etc. - signed the extensions that they had been offered when their schools found out they were looking around.