Couldn't agree with you more.
I don't think Hawk is a bad guy and in fact I don't think he is a bad coach. He is a guy who took the wrong approach to the wrong situation for his personality and is paying the price on the field. Winning attitudes are easy when you are winning, winning attitudes are at best fragile when you are losing and tend to fall apart when they are not backed by success. Peterson has not done anything increadable that Hawk didn't do at Boise, he did win a BCS game against a team that had already mailed it in when their shot at the MNC was gone but he won it using Hawk's recruits and Hawk's system. Eventually Peterson will leave Boise just like Hawk did and just like Koetter did and we will see how he does in a less protected environment.
I would not even be surprised if someday Hawk comes back to a head coaching position at a BCS level program and wins big after having a chance to evaluate the mistakes he made at CU and change his approach.
Winning teams have a winning identity, they believe that every time they go out onto the field, if they do what they are supposed to do as individuals and as a team they will win. They have a mentality that says "We will do X and nobody can stop us from doing X except ourselves." Hawk has failed miserably at establishing an identity with this team. They change offenses every year (often more than once.) They change defenses every year. One year they are all about accountablility, the next that is forgotten and they are up at the crack of dawn for morning practices. Before these ideas they were all about the lunchbuckets, etc. etc. etc..
I am not saying that Hawk should try to be another Mac but if you look at what Mac did to turn around a program that was dead in the water, he established an indentity. The I-bone that he installed was less about talent and more about a state of mind. He convinced his kids that as a team we were going to run the ball down peoples throats and they couldn't do anything about it. The kids came to believe that, the coaches believed it, the fans believed it, and eventually the opponents came to believe it and as a result the game was often won before the ball was ever kicked off. Under Hawk I see confusion, I see a team that is unsure of what it is doing and who it is, I see a team that is waiting for bad things to happen to it rather than good.
Bottom line is that Hawk has never put this team into a place where they believed they are going to win on the field. They may be a great bunch of guys, I believe they are, they may have tremendous success in their lives after CU football, I hope that they do. On the field they do not think like winners or act like winners and as a result they don't win. That is Hawk's fault and that is what he is paid to do. As a result he is in this job a failure.