swingman, I get your point. My response would be two-fold. Where are these guys--Gibbs and Lockwood--now? (As for the other guys, you're right. Many have gone on to do great things. College football assistant coaching is that way. Current Vikings' offensive line coach Pat Morris had an early stop in his coaching career up here under Joe Salem and went on to coach a lot of great lines at his alma mater, USC.)
Gibbs is doing the same thing Brewster was doing before he got the head coaching job here. He's an NFL position coach. Lockwood took a step down and is at West Virginia as the defensive backfield coach. If these guys were truly the top-drawer guys you contend that they are, they would have moved up, or at least made lateral moves, to where they were when they were on the Gopher staff. They are still relatively young in football terms and they still may turn out to be, as Joker Phillips did, FBS head coaches someday. My primary point, in this regard, is that they have been good enough coaches to consistently find places to land, but neither of them has fulfilled the early promise (inconsistent as it may have been in the eyes of some) accorded to them.
Second, I agree with your comment regarding the reluctance to pay assistant coaches at a level that will keep them in Minnesota. But whose fault is that? Mason had a total possible package of more than $2 million when he was fired. I can't find Brewster's comparable total, but it was considerably less and one of the reasons for that was the administration wanted to use some of the savings to hire quality assistant coaches and keep them here. Brewster couldn't do that, for whatever reason, but the resources were there (and Brewster needs to be taken to task for his inability to maintain a consistent set of lead coordinators).
I don't want this to sound like a "dump on Mason" post, but if there are only so many dollars to go around, they have to be spread in a way that will help create and maintain stability in the program. I believe that a case can be made that the athletic administration should have made this a higher priority and fell short and that many of the promising young coordinators brought in by Mason could have been retained had a stronger commitment been made.
But I don't want to make it sound like I'm backing off my critique of Lockwood and Gibbs. Solid football guys, but if they were everything that you contend that they are, they'd certainly have a higher profile than they currently enjoy.
As for Mason's overall record, your clarifications show me that my impression was off-base. The only caveat to that is that the nature of college assistant coaching requires a lot of guys to move around a lot as they are moving up the line from graduate assistant, to quality control, to position coach, to coordinator and the same record has likely been experienced by other less-than-stellar programs.