@HighEliteMajor
Nice and succinct summary. Although KU has a lot of tradition, it is still in a small market state in the Mid West which places it away from the big market and prime time programming and yet it manages to recruit very well.
Some people tend to forget that Coach Self's job is primarily to maintain a good and clean program and win "college" games; sending players to the NBA is a secondary goal that helps recruiting but not his main role. Naturally, some of the players he recruits are destined to be great college players but not necessarily NBA material' KU (and every othre school) players are drafted by the NBA based on their potential to be NBA players and not because of the school they attended or the shoe they wore. KU has the third-most players in the NBA with only Kentucky and Duke havinmg more and just placed 4 more players in the League. KU is doing just fine.
The talk of Wright's record suddenly improving because a perceived shoeco impact is just silly, his record improved not because suddenly he became a good coach (which he always was) but because the Big East 2010-2013 realignment weakened the conference and competition quite a bit.
Here is the final ranking for the Big East at he the end of the 2010-1011 season:
!0_1529932115395_upload-611042a2-55b7-4b60-a401-bf0d7535916d ↗
It shows the top 4 and 7 of the top 9 teams and 2 additional teams in the conference left during the realignment and in the last 8 years those teams collected 3 national titles...that is a lot of very good teams... and by default Villanova became the best basketball program. The Big East used to be the top conference with 16 teams and now is till decent conference with only 10 teans but no longer the top. The equivalent would be having OU, OSU, Texas, TCU, WVU and Baylor leave the Big 12 and the conference adding a few weaker teams and KSU becoming the top dog in the conference...in football of course.
Sometimes teams go through what I call the "perfect storm" when a combination of recruiting and development of lower ranked players creates a unique winning formula; Wichita State just went through a great 4-5 year run that allowed it to move to a better conference and appears to be ending now. Likewise, Villanova had a great run in the last few years but now it is starting to abate.
Some of my comments above are related to the thread topic in general and not necessarily to your comments.