Here’s a reality when it comes to coaching searches that I’ve found to be true in both basketball and football (at the coordinator level): Nobody has any freaking clue what’s going on. Sure, there are people who are more plugged in than most, but there are too many candidates and too many coaches to be able to realistically narrow things down to what’s actually going to happen.
So we make educated guess, try to figure out what we think administrators are looking for and then discuss hires ad nauseam for months after they are made. It’s a little different for head coaching searches in football because those are so high-profile that it gets difficult to operate under the radar.