Take a look at the Hall of Fame college basketball coaches and the hundreds of wins they’ve accumulated, yet are preserved in bronze plaques and statutes for just a handful of particular wins that happened to come on neutral floor in March.
No matter how great their style of play, strategies, or recruiting skills were, take away their NCAA Tournaments, and nobody would’ve remembered them. Coaches then and now over the past 80-plus years have built entire programs around NCAA Tournament success, or watched their careers run into the ground after a series of first round exits or trips to the NIT.