The biggest killer was dud of a 2016 class. 2015 (Collins, Moore, Crawford) was a good class, and if we could have followed it up in 2016 with some of our top targets (Giles, Eli Wright, Koby McEwen) we would have been in pretty good shape. Instead we completely struck out, and started bringing in players like Richard Washington. Having no contingency plan was a program-killer.
Use another example. I expect Richard Washington to have a really good year at San Jose State. He averaged 17/8/3 in JUCO last year.
Our program is in the shitter, but I think many don't fully understand why. They think that Manning sucks as a coach and therefore we suck. That's only 1/3 of it IMO.
To run a successful ACC program you need to be a good to great coach and you need to have a specific well thought out philosophy as to how you want to play, how you want to recruit, and how you want to "run a program."
For example, you could argue that Prosser was just a good coach, not a great one as far as gameplanning and in game adjustments. However, he had a deeply thought out philosophy as to how he wanted to run a program. Truthfully, he never quite nailed his recruiting philosphy post CP3. He got in the conversation with national 5star players and sort of lost laser focus. But he always had the program run in the mold he wanted.
With Manning, he's so far proven to be:
* Not a good coach
* No particular philosophy on how to run a program other than keep it clean
* Has zero recruiting philosophy. Go after 5stars, 4stars, 3stars if they have length and see who comes. Fill spots with grad transfers.
Because all three pillars of college excellence have not been met, we lose players to the pros a year or two earlier than we should and we lose transfers a year before the player could be a productive ACC-level player. In other words, it is not that Richard Washington was a bad player - it was that he was recruited happenstance, never provided a blueprint as to how he would develop over 4 or 5 years, and then recruited over. Same deal with Mitchell.
Honestly, if you were writing a blueprint for how to fuck up a program, you could pretty much follow Manning's choices over the last 5 years.