The offseason is all about perception.
No matter the outlook—positive, negative or somewhere in between—it's always an educated guess. Expectations need to factor in new coaches, returning starters, transfers in, transfers out, incoming recruits and outgoing seniors.
There simply is no foolproof method to measure those changes. Or, if there is, nobody has shared it with us.
What we can do, however, is consider all of those factors and find a suitable word to describe the entirety of a team's situation. This perception is built on a program's performance in 2021, early offseason changes and initial expectations for 2022.