I mean that's the golden question, isn't it?

I think there are some other factors like Distefano's recruiting restrictions and such but I really do think it comes down to poor coaching hires. Even Boyle, despite his success, didn't have the resume for a major conference job, he was handed some skilled players and had a good recruiter and now without those, not to say he's a totally bad coach but he doesn't seem capable of keeping up. I don't blame Hawkins as much as others do, I think he was just a bad coach, it happens sometimes at P5 programs, a good program should've been able to recover from him. The biggest problem with Hawkins was giving him the extra year, it really set up the next guy poorly rather than giving a guy a decent 2010 team and more time to recruit to prevent the 2011 and 2012 impending disasters.. And Embree was about the worst guy for the job, an unproven guy, given a program threatening a serious downward trend if the next guy can't quickly patch it up. Then we hire MacIntyre, who had 1 winning season to his name and not exactly impressive coordinator experience before that but it's actually pretty head-scratching in year 3 he can't beat Hawaii here yet he gave Stanford a run for their money in year 3 there, I don't know how good MacIntyre is but letting him bring his whole staff is proving to be killer. I see MacIntyre's hire as a desperate hope for a guy to fix our program, not a P5 hire, even if it did/does workout I wouldn't have called it a genius move regardless. Hiring Butch Jones would have saved us, I truly believe that.

Make a goddamn hire that says we're a Power conference program. Oregon State and Wazzu have both done that recently, and they pull in less revenue than us and have a lot less for a coach to sell and are historically weak programs.