Here's the problem. Coaches are hired specifically to play arena league football. See dykes at cal kingsbury at Texas Tech leach at wsu, etc.
Many schools simply think 55-52 is their best chance to win on a weekly basis. Fuck that
But that style of play will only take you so far. At some point when you play a real defense you are screwed.
It's like your admitting there's a ceiling to what/where your program can go. I.E Dykes is saying to his kids and fans "We can never win the Pac-12 North at Cal, so our goal is to win 7-8 games a year, maybe 9 and be entertaining as hell doing it" If I am a kid why would I want to play there, or as a fan why would I want to support both economically or emotionally a school that is admitting it can never win the conference championship or play in a Rose Bowl?
As a fan of Cal football, I won't support it precisely because the style of play means we'll wiin some and loose some but never play for anything of consequence. Last year our AD said something along the lines of We have big donors who are OK if we go 3-9 and our APR is 975. If that's the case, they've got the perfect coach and those big donors will soon be watching Cal games in a mostly empty stadium.
I don't have any hard evidence to back it up, but I think that it tends to attract good offensive recruits who want to showcase themselves for NFL scouts, and also repel good defensive recruits who want to go where they take defense seriously. There's discussion on BI about how this last recruiting cycle Dykes took in a gaggle of WR recruits but only two LBs or DLs. Is it a result of their recruiting focus being on offense, or did they want defense guys but couldn't get them because nobody wanted to come to defenseless Cal? The flip side of that is that you might get immediate PT by going to a team with shit defense, but then you might just end up being labeled as a guy with a lot of PT in his career on a shit defense.