Even if the PSU job becomes open, I can't see Rhule leaving after just two years with the way he seems wired. It would feel like he's leaving with unfinished business here at this point. Honestly, it would change his identity to use this program as a stepping stone and bailing before reaching anything consequential here. Temple and Baylor went from roadkill to playing in their conference championship. He put in a marathon's worth of effort to get Raiola here, and some of that meant taking advantage of Nebraska ties. He would be willing to abandon that, or risk having to rerecruit Raiola to PSU after just a year? Honestly, some of the hardest hard work is just now getting done with the groundwork now laid for a lot of the operations and inroads made. That would be a heck of a thing to just abandon and have to start over AGAIN when some of those major pieces just recently fell into place. Rhule's talking about this being a long term deal here. I would like to believe that. He's experienced about every level of football at this point, so I feel like he now knows the highs and lows of navigating a career trajectory.
I also think the timing of the new facilities will play a large role in keeping Rhule. It worked out to where most of the work was done to have it fully operational within a little over a year of him getting here, but he came in early enough to be able to suggest some tweaks to his liking. That just doesn't happen generally. After all of the talk of him trying to get a similar facility built in Carolina, I would think he would appreicate how the timing worked out for him to luck into what Nebraska was building at just the right time. Especially something that speak to his development acuman. Does Penn State have a similar set up? Would Rhule be ok leaving what he considers the ideal facility and work somewhere else without it? It might take PSU three or so years to recreate what he had here. And that's assuming they could get the backing for it after just okaying $800 million for stadium renovations.
PSU obviously has advantages over Nebraska in this case as discussed above, but Rhule would still be trading quite a bit of stuff to go there. Especially after just Year 2 at Nebraska.