Your first sentence here is great. Sure 25% is higher than 0%, but 75% is way the fuck higher that 25%, so there's that.
It is not cognitive dissonance to look at Manning's body of work at Wake and be extremely disappointed. He's had one ok season, with one player that vastly out performed his recruiting rankings. You keep asking what if John Collins hadn't left, what would have happened then, but let's consider the opposite for just a minute, what if Collin's had never come? Take away the Collins season and Manning is awful. Sure he is better than Bz, no doubt, but the results are more or less the same and from the outside looking in 7 out of 8 years have been futile and now our assistant coach killed a guy. Getting ranked 90 at the end of the season is really no different than being ranked 200 in most fans minds. Most people tune out if you fall below 65 and with 3 or 4 season is a row at that level no one pays attention anymore. I expect it's a logistic decay curve where satisfaction with the program starts to exponentially decay somewhere around 35 (approx the bottom of the "other receiving votes" category in the AP poll), and by the time you get to 90 its more or less flat lined. So our best season in 8 years was probably just barely at the point of down turn of the the logistic satisfaction curve.
Anyway, your are still placing different weight on certain data than other posters are, that's fine. But the reason people dislike you and your posting style is not because we secretly know you are correct, it is because many people weight the data differently than you and you act like they are imbeciles for emphasizing different data points in the same data set. Truth is they are doing the exact same thing as you but with different pieces of data, get over it and stop being a myopic dick about data interpretation.