My humble opinion is that the blame can firstly be laid at Hughton as the manager, but that said, he cant score goals. Neither can the board. RVW is our expensive potent striker and only 1 goal in the first game and is now the big time big flop, along with Hooper. If we had scored first in a lot of those games the complexion of the game would have changed and I would reasonably expect that we would have won a lot more games than we did. With the strikers not striking and having that game complexion in our favour this added pressure on the defence and after the oppos scored first that increased the pressure and the frustration of the strikers. It was a very common sequence. We went down simply because we didnt score enough and that's down to the strikers, RVW in particular. We had no strikers at all for the whole season, scored too few goals, got demoralised often after losing the first goal and in a lot of cases very early and the defence crumbled resulting in a huge GD with a large gap form those above - a gap that was always going to be unsustainable. Who goes - get rid of the two strikers regardless of their contracts and find two that know where the net is. I for one do not want to risk them in the team next season even though it is the championship.
I've NEVER felt so flat as far as NCFC goes as this should never have happened as we're far better than this - but we didnt score - dont score, cant win, cant get points, simple as that.