The American behavior market has been horrendous for years. Also, not everybody is single-mindedly focused on climbing up the US News rankings.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply he's ranking obsessed. But the salary at Boise is way low even compared to other state unis and even taking COL into account. Presumably unless he needs to be there for family reasons he would have moved if he could because, well, people generally don't like being much poorer than they need to