It is a true statement but it is a little deceptive in that it implies that our peak during those seasons is what those teams really were. Every team will have peaks and valleys during a season, and they are neither as good as those peaks nor as bad as those valleys. At the end, they are what they are.
I'd say it more as floors and ceilings. Teams have a ceiling, the most they could possibly get out of the talent they have. The lack of big-time recruiting has significantly lowered our ceiling, but it is rare for a major conference team to have a ceiling that's lower than sneaking in the tournament. It's similar in football, where except for certain wacko roster situations (2017 Illinois being one) the ceiling for any Power Five team is at least a backdoor 6-6.
It's my view that coaches, or really PROGRAMS, with all the human capital and infrastructure that implies, routinely tend to fall at a given point relative to their ceiling. All five John Groce teams were about the same distance worse than they should have or could have been (save the first one, arguably, although that team was both a Top 10 team in the country and then 2-7 in conference). Bo Ryan's teams were 9 seeds when they had mediocre talent, and became national title contenders with very good talent, same idea.
If you can develop a capital-P program where you maximize what you have, the natural baseline level of talent any major conference team is going to have is going to keep your head above water in almost all years. And then you have the opportunity to land big time players and reach higher than that. But if your program is such that you don't have the ability to maximize what you have, it's not that you MUST get elite talent to win, it's worse than that, even elite talent can't save you. See Lorenzo Romar and Johnny Jones and Paul Hewitt.