Lack of mental toughness and lack of execution. Failure to identify opponents weaknesses and consistently attack them, failure to adapt to change in style of volleyball across the country.
When NCAA volleyball changed from side-out scoring to rally scoring in 2001 (notice any significance about this date and our program?) it dramatically changed the way the game is played. Over the last decade teams have been re-learning how to play this new style from the lowest levels on up. Now we have kids coming into college who were raised on rally scoring, but we still don't see our coaching staff embrace the newer style of play. If you look around at the most successful teams at any level, they seem to have a few common threads. The switch disproportionally increased the importance of power serving, power attacking in transition, and serve receive. You hear coaches talk about it after every single match, ie "Our team lost the serve and pass battle tonight, so we lost."
However, up until the middle of last year, A&M was still trying to play a precision offense. This requires exceptional serve receive, which we have never had. As other teams focus more and more on developing power serves, it becomes harder and harder to run an offense which uses three first-tempo attackers, which A&M ran up until injuries forced the insertion of Jenny Banse into the starting lineup last year (Before that she was on the bench and Kelsey Bryant, who had basically the same skill set as a Middle blocker but played on the right side was the starter). Incidentally Banse becoming a starter really improved the team both because she was a stronger serve receiver than Sarah Ammerman and because she gave a third option as a second-tempo attacker.
At this level of volleyball you will find that the majority of teams at NCAA level and above can sideout when they pass perfectly. That's why you see teams like Texas and Penn State (top teams in the country this year) losing points to teams like Texas State or Robert Morris. The difference in the teams is either you have a team that can pass serve with significantly greater efficiency than most other teams (Like Iowa State this year or The US Men's olympic team in 2008) or you have a team with Power Hitters who can score points even when the serve reception is passed poorly (Like Texas this year or the Women's Olympic Team in 2008).
The power style works well but it requires a very rare athlete like Destinee Hooker or Megan Hodge (PSU). The "scrappy" style requires great recruits and a lot of mental toughness and great coaching, which is why people around the country are talking about Iowa State's coach Christy Johnson.
Either way, we haven't been able to successfully emulate either one of the styles.
It looked early on in this year like we would be a good scrappy team with the addition of Tori Mellinger but for whatever reason our reception has really faded over the last month or so and we can no longer side out as well as we could with our smaller hitters. Another factor is likely getting into the thick of conference play and facing much better blocks than we saw in preseason.
Another issue I have with the team is they don't seem to serve with any toughness at all, and when you aren't serving tough you can't put much pressure on opposing teams. Most of the good teams around the country have one or two extremely powerful jump servers. We have taken our best jump server (Sarah Ammerman) and converted her to a standing float server. Florida's coach Mary Wise likes to have personnel with varied styles of serving, such as power jump servers, jump float servers, short standing float servers, deep standing float servers, etc... If you look at our team, you see basically everyone using either the short standing float or a high jump float. These don't put much pressure on opposing teams, and since our blocking is so poor this year that's asking quite a bit from our back row defense to constantly try and stop other teams that are in-system nearly 100% of the time.
