The streak is over.

I'm not even sure where to begin here. The New Mexico Bowl was, flat out, an unmitigated disaster. In many ways, it went completely contrary to how I thought it would go - our defense was the force that kept us "in" the game, while it was our offense that was woefully inept.

How could this happen? Easy - penalties. Remember the second stat? Yep - it came back to bite us in the ass yet again, this time to the tune of eight penalties for fifty-nine yards, frequently at the worst times imaginable. It's not like the New Mexico crowd was that rowdy, either, so we can't blame crowd noise. Simply put, our team was not prepared. If you saw the game, it was clear that the offensive line was inept and ill-prepared. They were also the source of many of our penalties.

If I gave you three weeks to plan for something - anything - would you be able to do it? Would you at least be ready to begin work on whatever that was when the moment arrived? What about a football game? Would your team be ready to follow a basic snap count? Would your offense be capable of running routine blocking patterns? Would you be able to hold a running game piloted by a third-string running back not named "Kretchmer" to under 190 yards? I think you would, no matter who you are, which is why I think that just about anyone with a pulse would be an improvement over the "capable" leadership of Coach Chris Ault.

Okay - that's not quite accurate. We don't need another warm body. We've had plenty of those. What we need is someone with a little drive, a little gamesmanship, and, most importantly, someone whose best moves and methods didn't come and go over fifteen years ago.

Some people, however, disagree. Let's cover those points, one by one...

- Do I think Nevada should contend for a national championship? Of course not. We're in the WAC. That's not happening. I do expect that we would, at least once, go in a direction that gives us a fighting chance to make the same kind of noise that Hawaii, Boise, and Fresno make.
- Do I think high school seniors should choose us over Ohio State, Florida, USC or Notre Dame? Perhaps we can beat Notre Dame on the recruiting trail... I mean, they are terrible. But, no, I don't expect us to choose us over them. I do expect that we can, at some point, be in the same breath as Hawaii, Boise, Fresno, or perhaps even BYU. We've been getting hammered by Boise on the recruiting trail time and again, and I've yet to see a single sign of change. Getting shut out to New Mexico in a bowl game doesn't help.
- Yes, we've gone to three consecutive bowl games. We lost two of them, and lost our shutout streak in one. There's no point in going to a bowl game if we're going to get embarrassed. Heck, the only reason we went to one this year is because Hawaii went undefeated; were it not for that, we'd be staring at a 6-6 season.
- Yes, we have some great quarterbacks. Outstanding. We had some decent ones under Tisdel and Tormey, too. It's the rest of the team that's always been problematic.

I have respect for what Ault has done. He earned his Hall of Fame credentials. He took a moribund program and turned it into a program that we could realistically talk about winning a WAC championship with. I'm happy with that. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that Ault can get past that hump. Our record has consistently declined since 2005. Our teams are consistently either underprepared or misprepared whenever he has more than a week to work with, whether that's the beginning of the season or a bowl game. We're still getting beat on the recruiting trail to schools that are only marginally better than we are, facilities-wise.

I'm pleased with what Ault has done for this program. It's time he hands this off to someone else... and, this time, Groth needs to prove how much better of an athletic director she is and find us a coach from outside the program. As Sean Patrick pointed out, we're not Ohio State, USC, or any of those other big-time schools with amazing pedigrees. We're Nevada, a decent program in a decent conference - we don't have a pedigree worth sweating over.