They are correlated, but it's not 1 to 1. There are plenty of teams out there that recruit at high levels despite poor performances. My personal example is UNLV, but there's obvious coaching choices that pull recruits higher than their weight class. Of course, that typically means on court success is lacking, or they would just be known as good coaches.
On court success is the easiest way to get good recruits. I guess my point is there needs to be some concept what who we can pull. Offer every top 50 kid for all I care, but spending time (and OV's) but theres gotta be some self awareness. TBH it's probably that we know about 5% of whats going on, but it seems like the staff wasted more time then they should've on kids they should not have. Though hindsight helps, there must have been some feeling that a few of those kids were pipe dreams.
At the end of the day, theres always going to be second place finishes and wasted recruiting time, but I don't think we have to have 20 win seasons to pull every guy we want.
I don't think there is a school out there that would turn down on OV to a top 50 kid that they have offered. Maybe only the blue bloods, but that's because they'd likely have a great shot at a top 25 kid at the same position. But even that would be very rare.