Why did Wacker fail at Minnesota?

What's everyone's opinion about why Wacker failed at MN?

My memory of Wacker teams is that they could generally score points, and the offense could be fun to watch. But they couldn't stop anybody. It was a lot like last week -- Gophers chasing the other team all over they place. Too slow and poor tacklers. You never, ever had hope that we could stop the other team.

Was it bad recruiting? Bad coaching? I don't know ... we didn't have the internet experts to tell us. But defense has been the biggest problem here for most of my lifetime.

He had little interest in defense and wanted to "air it out" all the time, as he put it. Ball control, running game, defense not part of his plan. He had some good ball players (including Cory Sauter, Chris Darkins), but that formula didn't work. He scored a lot, but suffered a lot of blow-out losses.

Because Minnesota is not a place you can win.

His offenses could move the ball and put up points, but we couldn't stop anyone.

His fundamental flaw was he thought you could win with offense only

That and he did not recruit enough Big10 level athletes and he could never get any of the top five local kids to stay at Minnesota. If you watched a Wacker practice, they coordinated all efforts on the offensive side of the ball, all the best players were on the offense, all of the speed and skill
was recruited for the offense, some days the defense would be sitting on the sidelines working on there sun tans. His fundamental flaw was that he really thought he could "out score" all opponents even Big 10 opponents and at some point that would win out. That and his recruiting strategy was flawed, he thought he could recruit 4th and 5th tier division one athletes out of Texas and that they would still be better than all Minnesota, Wisconsin, Dakota and Iowa type players. Beyond the TC Metro Wacker, pretty much ignored the rest of the area from a recruiting aspect.

His offensive system was actually executed quite well and the style of play was interesting. What was not interesting is that the opponent could go up the field
and score at will or in no time flat, because the defense could not make a play at the line of scrimmage. The biggest example is he had Tim Rose run the 3-4 defense with a NG that
weighed 220 lbs a converted linebacker named Ackbar. Kid was a strong as the day is long but when your his size playing against 320 lb offensive lineman and your whole D-line is light you get owned all day. Run the ball and you are up the field 5-10 yards before someone touches you. At that time in Big 10 play the theory that
"Mass Kicks ass" was correct. Some of Tim Brewsters recruiting strategy appears to have mirrored Jim Wacker that we can always go get better players from far away places
then we can in our own backyard, we can always get better players from Florida and Texas then anyone in the upper Midwest, may be true on paper but not always on heart and mind.
One thing they always forget is that when these players are so far from home they have no guidance and support from there Family's at the games, at least not as much opportunity.

Same thing that's been bugging us for most of the past four decades: no defense. It's a bit foggy, but he seemed to turn over defensive coordinators/staff as well. I remember they brought in Tim Rose to run the defense Wacker's last season after Rose had been let to as head coach at Miami (O). Rose promised the fans an exciting, unorthodox defense. The sets were unorthodox, but the results were anything but exciting.