If that last few years have proven anything, we've learned that you do not need to have a team filled with Top 100 high school recruits to reach the Final Four. It certainly helps, but George Mason and Butler have shown you can make it to the Final Four even without those types of players. (VCU also had limited Top 100 talent, but Jamie Skeen was an RSCI Top 100 selection out of high school.) 

But having few Top 100 recruits is the exception, not the rule. Here are the 36 most recent Final Four teams and the percentage of minutes each team gave to RSCI Top 10 and Top 100 recruits: 

Out of the 36 teams, 27 gave over half their available minutes to Top 100 recruits in the year they went to the Final Four. Clearly, the path is a lot easier with elite talent.

On the other hand, not having a Top-10 recruit on the roster is fairly common. Twenty of the 36 teams did not have a Top-10 recruit on the roster. This fact was probably exacerbated by all the high school to the NBA players early in the decade.

It turns out Georgetown’s 2007 team was more of a Cinderella team than I remember. Interestingly, despite giving over 75% of its minutes to Top 100 players the last three years, Georgetown has zero NCAA tournament wins in that span. Sometimes high school talent does not correlate with NCAA success. And as I like to point out, Billy Donovan depended less on elite high school talent in 2006 and 2007 than at any point in his Gator career:

Indeed talent helps, but it takes a lot more than talent to make the Final Four. It takes coaching, hard work, and quite a bit of luck.