One of the things I am called upon to do as part of my line of work is failure analysis. A detailed accounting of exactly what the failure is and exactly what led to the failure produces a clear picture of how that failure could have been mitigated or averted and, more importantly, how it can be mitigated or averted in the future.

With that in mind, let’s perform some failure analysis on the Lovie Smith era.

Failure: Recruiting never got the boost it should have from the beginning

There was a little bit of juice for the 2017 class, but all in all this was a pedestrian effort for a head coach whose hiring generated so much buzz.