So your standard of success is the Elite Eight or ACC Championship?
Not solely, no. In most cases, I think a relative evaluation, such as the one you posted, is a decent means of evaluation. However, what it fails to recognize is that there are absolute achievements that trump relative ones--making the Final Four, for instance--and would automatically make the season a success regardless of relative performance.
The second major flaw in what you put forth is that it accords equal weight to the ACCT and NCAAT. Let's look at the 2009 team as an example. That year, we finished as the 2 seed in the ACCT and a 4 seed in the NCAAT. Your formula calls for four postseason wins, two in each tournament. However, if you gave any fan the choice on how to allocate those wins, I firmly believe that anyone would take an "unsuccessful" season by forfeiting the ACCT and taking all 4 in the NCAAT for a Final Four berth than taking the "successful" season by sending two wins to each. Along that same line of reasoning, your formula doesn't allow a team to overachieve in one tournament to make up for underperformance in the other, even when that would result in their total postseason wins meeting or exceeding the expected amount.
Finally, your formula provides for no means of evaluating over- or under-performance in the regular season. If we follow a slightly more extreme example of the Texas 2010 route and start the season ranked in the top-5 nationally, crash and burn our way to a 20-11 record*, win one game in the ACCT as the 6 seed, and then lose in the first round of the NCAAT as a 10 or 11 seed, that has not been a successful year, IMO, and I think most people would agree with me.
And with that, I've spent far too much time thinking about and discussing this.
*LOL at calling that "crashing and burning" after three years of the Bzaster.
