The firing of University of Maine men’s hockey head coach Tim Whitehead has figuratively pushed the “Restart” button on UMaine athletics, finally confronting a problem that became fully apparent during a year of sub-par performance across the entire athletic landscape.

By doing this, athletic director Steve Abbott and UMaine President Paul Ferguson address the continuingly declining state of the UMaine athletic program, yet haven’t offered any tangible evidence of being able to fix it.

Pathway 3 of President Ferguson’s Blue Sky Project cites athletics as an initiative designed to “[s]trengthen the organization for, and reaffirm the campus engagement of, athletics, promoting our role as the state’s only Division I school.”

It’s difficult to promote a program that, for the last decade, has experienced success as an outlier across the athletic platform, rather than the norm. The only consistent, recent success has been the baseball program, and the majority of their season takes place while the students are on summer break.

That’s not to say our athletic program hasn’t fostered individual talent: The football program has produced a significant amount of NFL players in the past 10 years, and cross country and track and field have produced standouts in recent years. But, in the same breath, a chunk of talent that UMaine has been able to reel in has left early for one reason or another, or transferred to another university, which leaves a gap of talent that has stymied any sort of continuous progress. For example, Hobey Baker finalist Gustav Nyquist left after his junior year in 2011, and Matt Mangene followed suit the next year; cross-country standout Riley Masters transferred to the University of Oklahoma two years ago; and just recently, men’s basketball standout Justin Edwards filed his transfer papers after his sophomore year.

President Ferguson is paying for Whitehead’s buyout with money from his Discretionary Account, but Abbott indicated that the athletics department is committed to reimbursing him through “anticipated revenues generated by renewing fan interest and increased ticket sales.”

It’s tough to see how that’s possible, when the best athletes are leaving early and there’s little success across the board this year. Other than women’s soccer going 7-7-3 and baseball currently leading America East Conference, every other team in 2012-13 finished below a .500 winning percentage.

There’s one universal truth to athletics: If they don’t win, people don’t want to watch.

There isn’t a simple solution to this problem — otherwise it would have been solved. UMaine is stuck with financial restraints at the state level and no increase in tuition. At the same time, the ability to retain our generation’s attention for more than 5 minutes is becoming frighteningly difficult.

A good start for UMaine and the athletic department would be to show there is stability at the top. Abbott’s contract as athletic director ends in June, and there is no indication from either side that Abbott will be returning aside from an October interview with The Maine Campus where Abbott said he and the president hadn’t talked yet and he’s “enjoying the job.”

Between the firing of Cindy Blodgett in 2011, just one day after accepting her two-year contract; the on-going construction at the Field House; the lacking consensus of where men’s and women’s basketball will be housed in the foreseeable future; and now Whitehead’s dismissal, Abbott is fully invested in whether the transformation of the athletic department is a success.

There’s good reason to believe Abbott is committed to rebuilding the program — the Orono native grew up in the shadow of the university — but that commitment would be validated if we knew he was in this for the long haul.