Yeah, that's a good example. However that 4 seed was almost solely based on how them winning the tourney behind a crazy performance by Gilchrist. So they weren't really a legit really good team that year.
But IIRC, they then started the next year off red hot, I remember they destroyed a pretty decent Memphis team early in the season, and then the wheels just came off. You had this nucleus of highly recruited sophomores and juniors, coming off an ACC tourney championship and decent showing in the NCAAs, and I think they got ranked in the Top 15 or so. Then the wheels just started to come off the cart, starting with Gilchrist.
Regarding the year McCray got suspended, I did not think that team was headed to the NCAAs either. That team suffered from a lot of the same flaws that the previous year's team did. McCray getting booted was sort of just the icing on the cake.
To me, those teams sort of symbolize the start of the decline, so maybe that's why I view them so unfavorably. If the players on those teams had decent heads on their shoulders they should have been a Top 10/15 team when they were through, and instead they were missing the NCAAs.