Underwood cleaned up in free agency the portal and eventually figured out how to integrate those pieces into his system. He had to weather the storm bought about by the his star player being arrested and charged with rape, then had to effectively reset once he was reinstated.
The tourney struggles are well documented, and that's a knock against him for sure, but he does have the program in a place where the conversations throughout the season are about tournament seeding rather than if we even have a good enough record to qualify for one of those joke consolation tournaments.