There are a whole bunch of additional good points that would serve as attractions to taking the head coach gig at the Bulldogs. I'm struggling to think of another club who managed to sign a coach away from another club within days of them winning a premiership, but ours did that in the case of Hasler. Dib gets some of the credit there because he managed a board that presented a united front and represented stability.
Then you go to the sacking of Hasler and the hiring of Pay. It is well documented that at least one other proven coach looked at the job at the time and said no thanks, but how did we go from being able to snap up a proven top level coach days after he won a premiership with another team, to being only able to sign a rookie who is on record saying he took the job partly out of a desire to rejoin the club (and evidence is that he was honest about this). Yes the salary cap issues are a big part of the problem, but other clubs have endured salary cap problems without this amount of upheaval.
I'm interested in your thoughts on this. My current thinking is that a crucial moment was when Dib went to James Graham and asked him to sacrifice himself. That was an error that I reckon a lot of blue and white folk will never forgive him for, myself included. It certainly was a major factor in him getting turfed out at the next election. The other ticket essentially won by default as a result. A lot of us hoped that they would prove to be effective regardless, and they have done some things well (signing Thompson being a big one, though ironically it seems Graham played a role in that). But the rot started to show late last season, especially with the Mitchell rumours. Since then things have been handled poorly one after the other, and at this stage all of the things that represent an attraction in terms of being the head coach at the Bulldogs come with a qualifying asterisk; *but you have to deal with the board.