Getting light-years off topic, but I made this point in another thread weeks ago:
People complain that we've gotten easy paths through the Tournament in our last few runs -- our region fell apart in 2004, faced 8 seeds for the championship in 2011 and 2014, faced 5 seeds in the Final Four in 2023 -- but we got absolutely none of that luck in the 90s and early 00s.
We never had a 1 seed knocked out early, we almost always faced the toughest possible seeds in the later rounds -- 1994 lost to chalk 3 seed Florida in Miami, 1995 lost to chalk 1 seed and eventual champ UCLA in California, 1998 lost to chalk 1 seed UNC in NC, 2002 lost to chalk 1 seed Maryland, 2003 lost to chalk 1 seed Texas in Texas.