5th Year, so judge

[1SE]

Alrighty-o. Kicking off Shaka's 5th year - where do you stand? How heavily does the NIL-House world weigh on your judgement? How much NCATT success do you need? I've pulled a few comparative metrics (with the help of ChatGPT - so might be hallucinated) in terms of NCATT Depth of Run (25 teams have gone EE or deeper), NCATT wins (22 teams have 4+ wins), NCATT appearances (19 other teams with 4 season NCATT streak) and Win% of P6 teams since 2021-2022 (ChatGPT especially struggled here, but I think 12 P6 teams with >MU's 70.5%). The 10 teams that met all four of those criteria - i.e. those that have had unequivocally better RESULTS than MU since Shaka took over:

Alabama
Auburn
Duke
Houston
Kansas
North Carolina
Purdue
Tennessee
UConn
Gonzaga (P6 caveat)

Not a bad list - and if you argue that PROCESS also matters, and NIL funding availability matters, then certainly Shaka might be about as good as they come.

That said, I still don't like going into year 5 (the first "completely Shaka" team with "his guys") as a fringe tournament team. I think we do better than that, but a deep March run doesn't seem overly likely this year.