About the only aspects it's not is ISU had a much weaker nonconference schedule (a dumb metric to judge a team by when teams are 3 months removed from it), and UNC was a regular season champion of a by far inferior conference, whereas ISU finished second in the most difficult conference in college basketball.
Not just the fact that its 3 months from it, it doesn't even really do what it purports to.
Like, people justify it because they're like 'teams should schedule tough games', but when most of that metric isn't those tough games it falls flat. Most teams nonconferences really have 2 portions: about 5 cross-conference games that are meant to be somewhat challenging, and then a bunch of buy games.
We scheduled 8 buy games
like everyone else. Those buy games were extremely bad but functionally a team that scheduled 200 Net teams instead of 300 net teams wouldn't be any more challenged by that schedule but would get a much nicer number on their team sheet. And this is all largely unpredictable anyway.
So lets say we came up with a metric that threw out those 8 games and just looked at the rest. I'd argue
that metric wouldn't really do what it was designed to do either. Because its not how college basketball scheduling works. Teams schedule these neutral site tournaments years in advance before anyone can know the quality. And the prestige of those tournaments often depends on your own success level (and we weren't exactly in-demand). We really didn't have much of a choice in any of this portion of our scheduling, between the tournament, our rivalry game with Iowa, and the big east game being picked for us. How does penalizing for this change something that was mostly out of our control?
Plus that metric is an extremely small sample size for most teams given its like 5 games. Why should that be given so much weight over a full conference and conference tournament slate? Especially when, as noted, it isn't really something most programs have control over?
