Have either of you ever taken any training on decision-making?
First rule of decision-making is that determining "good" vs "bad" decision-making is based on the PROCESS followed, not the result.
In every decision, you usually have limited information. I.e. when you hire a coach, you don't know what the result will be, you're just trying to use the information you have to pick the best one. Information such as the coach's past history, the coaches description during interviews of who they are and what their intentions are, etc.
I personally thought the Hazell hire at the time was very questionable because he had limited head coaching experience, and was worried that coming from the Tressel coaching tree that he was going to try to line up, win in the trenches, and run the ball, which Purdue doesn't have the talent & recruiting to do like OSU does. And while he was successful in turning Kent State around, he was a run-first coach there too. But I view that coaching hire as a mistake due to THAT, not due to the fact that the results were terrible.
Whereas hiring Brohm was the opposite. He was an innovative offensive-minded coach who was known for high-flying offense, coming to a school known as the "cradle of quarterbacks" and where Joe Tiller had had success with pass-first offenses designed to get the ball in space rather than go 3 yards and a cloud of dust. I liked the hire immediately, and that was NOT because the results were better.
I don't know enough about Holtmann, but it wouldn't surprise me if doing a decision-making analysis of his hiring, especially given the timing of Matta leaving, was that he was the best decision they had available at the time to make, and given his trajectory at Butler, might have been viewed as a good decision if it had been made in a more traditional coach hiring window. The results haven't panned out, but that doesn't mean the decision was poorly made.
