Some rumblings of a more robust open search to be conducted
As rusty pointed out, it was always going to be this way. He didn't fire Messingham just to family farm the job. He didn't do that with the others hire he made. People are not giving Klieman the benefit of the doubt because they think he's lazy and dumb like most kso posters are.
To be fair, the guy hired Messingham in the first place. And, Ray for that matter. Both of them had been fired from their only Power 5 jobs before being part of the NDSU reclamation project.
But, it would be absolutely insane for Klieman to go back to the NDSU well at this point.
He was keeping a previously successful staff together, this isn't the case anymore.
Klieman had the ammo to have an understanding that Messingham and Ray were not good enough to be quality power 5 level coaches (frankly - either schematically or from a recruiting standpoint - they've both been dogshit in both areas - both before KSU and during their KSU tenures).
To have moved forward with bringing them on board for the sake of continuity is silly (if - and I don't know - that was his reason). If he wanted to throw a bone to his friends, fine, I guess. Messsingham and Ray have been failures at previous coaching stops, so this end result shouldn't be some enormous surprise for anyone.
