Indeed, because the question here is process.
The thing really boils down to whether Dan Enos turned the job down, or whether Bielema picked Petersen over Enos.
That's oversimplifying a tad, but the facts are that Enos:
1. Walked away from an FBS head coaching job to be Bielema's OC at Arkansas
2. Was his most recent OC and his side of the ball wasn't what sunk things (#34 offense in 2017 per SP+), they worked really well together all three years
3. Enos is currently a non-OC at a non-Power Five school
The mystery of the Bielema record is what happened at Arkansas and how you should that affect your view of him. The bad version of it is that Bielema showed himself to be a clown and a headcase unworthy of the job, and someone's whose stature and credibility in the profession had plummeted as a result. Reflected further in losing a key assistant to a lateral move after every one of his Arkansas seasons. A guy like Enos refusing to take a promotion and raise to reignite a very successful partnership would be overwhelmingly suggestive of that issue. And above anything about Bielema, that would be a really damning indictment of Whitman's process, for whom Bielema's (genuine!) history of hiring top-quality assistants was a big selling point and something he's mentioned over and over in the past couple weeks.
And then if Bielema hired Petersen instead of Enos, who is just an objectively more qualified, higher valued coach, who, again, coordinated excellent offenses for Bielema the last time he was a head coach, the question is what is the galaxy-brained rationale for hiring some rando he knows nothing about instead?
One of the reason we all had trepidation about hiring a hot coordinator type for the job was that they would need to cobble together a mishmashed staff without a deep well of connections to work with. WELP.