I know there's a narrative surrounding the Shaka years that he got super elite recruits whom he did nothing with but there's more to the story than that. The one area where Shaka recruited exceptionally well was along the frontline. Jarrett Allen, Mo Bamba, & Will Baker were his best recruits. Addionally he had an eye to latch on early to underrecruited bigs who would later explode on the scene in Kai Jones and Jaxson Hayes. The one elite guard he recruited on par with those aforementioned bigs was Andrew Jones. In cbb, elite bigs are nice to have but they're the salad that comes along with the main course. Nice to have, but hardly essential.
Not recruiting or developing a collection of top tier guards helped lead to Shaka's issues at UT. That and not building a true culture of toughness with players who can consistently excel in the clutch. I remember seeing something that said somewhere around 30% of UTs games during Shaka's tenure were decided by 3 points or less. That mealy mouthed talk of togetherness and connectivity is ok ONLY if it supplements a culture of tough mindedness and resiliency which it obviously didn't under Shaka.
And I dont know whether it was a function of Shaka sort of becoming a head coach too early in his career (dude was only an assistant for 3 years at the power 5 level prior to becoming a head coach) or his overreliance on an analytical approach to the game, but Shaka's time at UT was a monument to getting the broad strokes of basketball but not having a grasp on what it takes to lead young men and set them up to perform their best when the stakes are at their highest. There were too many times to count during his tenure where a really good span of play, be it for a series of games or a series of minutes during a game, would come crashing down into an epic choke job.