I'm at a complete loss as to what kind of fracture is going on inside the team. Is Lovie is a nightmare coach and his on-air personality is 100% fake? Are his staffing choices just breathtakingly bad? I mean, he knew Hardy for years...was Lovie blind to the needs of the job and picked a bad fit, or was Hardy the good guy and Lovie is just a nightmare? Without knowing what's going on inside, I can only guess. And I have every incentive to hope that Hardy (and Abraham?) was a disaster, and that Lovie was giving him space to show progress. Because that problem is the easiest to solve.
This would be my best guess:
I think Lovie is a very confident guy who thought this was going to be pretty easy, but walked into the job very unprepared to be a major college recruiter, to adapt lesser talent against modern college schemes, especially his trademark defense against modern offenses, and to recruit, guide, and be a leader of the current generation of players.
To the first point, a person of Lovie's age and stature was never going to be a door-to-door salesman grinder on the recruiting trail. He was always going to need to hire a staff to really bear that load and he didn't do it. He gave the big jobs to two people he had close personal relationships with, Nickerson who just was never cut out for coaching on this level, and Garrick McGee who was a very strong hire on paper, but who it seems is not a great guy and not a model of professionalism when he's not under Bobby Petrino's thumb. He came to this job to get freedom and leeway and he seemingly abused it. In the spots below that it was more NFL buddies of Lovie and a couple of surprising holdovers from the previous staff, as if he just couldn't be bothered to look for other people. Because it was March I ignored it, but that was a bad sign. Only Thad Ward was hired to be a nose-to-the-grindstone recruiter. This hasn't been fixed since. Cory Patterson seems to have worked out better than Abraham or Austin Clark, but none of them is a proper college coach.
To the second point, Lovie is rich and famous because of his mastery of a defense that was perfect for stopping mid-00's offenses with NFL caliber players. Tempo spreads have shredded Lovie's defense in college. Football is moving on. And I don't think it's a question of a talent gap to our opponents as much as it's just the absolute level of talent. Guys as good as 26 year old Brian Urlacher or Lance Briggs or Peanut Tillman do not exist in college at Bama or anywhere. This defense asks players to play with a level of fluidity and instinct that 20 year olds don't have.
And on the third point, all of those great Bears I mentioned are around 40, the same age as Josh Whitman. I think Whitman thinks of himself as someone who really understands the mentality of these young guys, and he really responded to Lovie the way an Urlacher or a Tillman did, he really bought into this being the savior. But today's players are of a very different generation who don't respond to the reserved, treat them like men attitude in the same way. They are motivated by a more hands-on sort of bond.
Plus, it's clear that Lovie and his staff were very committed in sidelining their inherited players in favor of new guys, largely to make early playing time a sell to incoming recruits, to ease the burden on a staff not set up to win on the trail. And I think they lost any leadership in the locker room on Day 1 by doing that, I think it was a huge mistake. Our young guys have come into a program where there weren't older guys with a sense of ownership over the program setting expectations and being leaders and culture enforcers in the absence of the coaches. That's the secret sauce of any winning program, in any sport.
So Lovie is left with a staff that doesn't fit, schematic problems he's not an ideal answer for, and a locker room without enough leaders than he doesn't have a great connection with. It's a heck of an uphill battle at this point. I think he gets another year simply because his buyout is $12+ million and Whitman isn't ready to admit failure, and he will have the advantages of an easy schedule and an older, more experienced team next year, but he's going to have to really pull a rabbit out of his hat with staff, strategic and cultural issues for this to last any longer than 2019, IMO. It's possible, but it's a longshot.