Econometrics is one of the most discredited branches of academics that exists. These were the people who were waving their models around in the early 1990s, trying to tell people that NAFTA would have no effect on manufacturing jobs in the United States. They also promoted elimination of Glass-Steagall and the deregulation of the housing market, resulting in the subprime fraud-based economic disaster of 2008.
There's a reason the neoclassical economists are hidden away in business schools, not in the actual science departments - it's because they'd have to endure the ridicule of anyone with basic training in science and math. When your models predict the opposite of what actually occurs, time and time again, well, you're supposed to recognize that there are fundamental flaws in them and go back to basics.
Imagine if, in the late 1970s, all the climate researchers had predicted several decades of global cooling thanks to human activity, and had turned out to be entirely wrong, yet made no effort to re-examine their basic assumptions about how the world works. That's what neoclassical economists are doing with their econometric model nonsense.