When you play a bunch of lightly recruited players, this is where you end up sometimes. Competitive, but can't finish the job.
Snyder has always hoped to catch lightning in a bottle one time - that perfect season where he has the right schedule and the right set of overachievers. Unfortunately, college football has changed in a way that makes his approach almost impossible to work now.
When he started, the goal was to schedule 4 non conference patsies, beat KU, MU, ISU and Okie State every year and hope to catch a year when OU, NU, and CU were down, go to the Orange Bowl and maybe beat a team outside the top 10 to claim a piece of the national title. Then the Big 12 happened and suddenly there's a conference title game.
So then the strategy was to beat the weaker North, catch NU on a down year and play one big game in the title game for a chance to go to the national title game. He got it right once, but slipped up against A&M.
Now with the round robin, he can't avoid the stronger teams some years and he still has to deal with a title game in conference, plus the CFP means even if he wins the conference, he doesn't get a month to prep for the national title game, he has a month to prep for the semifinal.
His whole strategy won't work now because college football changed around him and passed him by. He can't plan to play just one perfect game in a perfect season where everything clicks just right. He has to be top 2 in a round robin, then win the conference title game, then beat two of the top four teams in the country. Snyder never built for this landscape and now he is stuck.
He won't be bad, but the best he can do is maybe 9 wins. His plan has a ceiling because he wanted to play one or two big time games in the season, but to win a national championship you have to play four or five, and even in a perfect scenario, he never built for that.