Perhaps part of the problem today is that we don't have a Bob Chernak who had been an inside presence in lobbying on behalf of this program.  If Forrest Maltzman was to have been considered his replacement in this regard, let's just say that the dichotomy of these two individuals was like night and day.  It's very easy to answer GW73's question by saying "of course" the current regime has the same aspirations.   After all, who doesn't want to win?  On the other hand, the school has retained TV who is a lesser experienced AD particularly regarding the school's flagship sport as well as brought in a head coach who is a young up and comer (but not yet firmly established) without conducting a very exhaustive head coaching search.  This is not to say that TV or JC are the wrong people for their positions; they in fact may both turn out to be superstars.  However, they are both younger and are likely costing the school less than other more experienced candidates might have been commanding.  So, the answer might be "do our best with what we have" as opposed to "do what it takes to be a perennial Top 40 program."

Getting back to The NET rankings, I would urge subscribers to The Athletic to read today's KenPom article on redefining the quadrants.  Some adjustments have already been made for home, neutral and road games (hard to believe this was not initially factored).  Pomeroy looks at his bubble teams from last year (defined as those ranked between 30-70, which would presumably include many midmajors) and found that creating a 5th quad (playing teams ranked 176+ at home, 301+ on the road, or 231+ on a neutral court) resulted in a W-L record of 295-6.  Those 6 are really bad losses.  His redefined quad 4 (61-175 at home, 151-300 on the road and 101-230 on a neutral court) , resulted in about an 80% win rate.  The point being that we (and more importantly the committee) are simply treating any Quad 4 loss as a terrible loss but in reality, a few are spectacularly awful while most others have about a 1 in 5 chance of resulting in a loss.  As always, very interesting stuff.