Going at this from the back end first and looking at the desired end result of an Elite designation I tend to favor a somewhat inclusive definition of Elite - we have recently heard the 99%/1% in politics, but I think I still prefer the 90%/10% range to define the top end of things. In D1 there are 300 +/- WCBB teams which would mean the top 10% would be somewhere in the 30 team range - or, because some schools have a WCBB program almost by default, maybe dropping the 'Elite' designation to around 20 would be more realistic. (NB the 99/1 result would be 2-3 teams) So if we aim to designate the top 20 +/- teams, it would seem we are looking for teams consistently in the top 20 and or consistently getting to the 2nd/3rd round of the NCAA tournament. That widens the pool considerably from what a lot of people have suggested.
The other issue is time frame for the consistency - personally, I think it has to be a recent time frame and long enough to mitigate against the result that a single star player can have on what has been and soon will be again a mediocre team. with scholarships at four years, using 8 years would seem to be a minimum and I think 10 years is a good number - when you go beyond 10 years you diminish the importance of current success and with a rapidly developing game you run the risk of including results from what was truly a different era in the game.
And the proof of any definition really lies not in the obvious top end of the pool (Uconn) but in the borderline - teams that had a nice run and have trended down, and teams that were bad but are trending up, and the teams that have been consistently decent, but never reached the summit. Rutgers is a perfect example of the first, Baylor maybe of the second (and of the 4 year influence of a single recruit), and maybe UNC as the third? I suspect by my definition all three would be in, but you could easily argue that any one of them may not belong.
Finally - if you look at recruiting and general reaction to where end recruits sign (and discount choice based purely on home town), I think it indicates what people generally consider to be elite programs - when Bone signed with SC, it was a real surprise when DD signed with UNC, not so much, etc.
Just one final thought - I checked the definition in Websters and was shocked, I tell you shocked, to discover the word comes from French - seems to be awfully un-American to be using a French word to define anything related to Uconn, he said as he ate his Freedom Fries! (That was how I knew that TN complain was completely bogus - Sue and Diana have never eaten French Fries in their lives!)
