Voice of the Hawkeyes Board

Great breakdown here. Especially in such a competitive conference, there's an extremely fine line between winning and losing in a lot of games. As you said, Iowa really isn't far off right now.

Very true, but on the flipside, the home game against Wisconsin and the game at Penn State could have gone the other way as well. But Iowa is definitely knocking on the door to enter that upper tier.

If Iowa can win these last four regular season games, I think the Hawkeyes are close to a lock to make it, no matter what happens in the conference tourney. A win in the conference tourney would make it a lock, IMO.

Well, I was going to start my own thread on this topic, but I refrained, as U2hawk did a great job outlining how close this team is to being Very good.

And the Hawkeyes are still in the hunt, however, the game at Indiana is a major, major hurdle. Although, less than one year ago, we beat IU at
Carver and played a very tough game against them at start of this BigTenn season.

Iowa dropped in the Sagarin rankings.........however.......it is still a MAJOR PLUS to be in the Big Ten conference, the Best Conference in all of
College hoops this year. I think we are in IF we win the 3 homes games, (including Illinois on 3/5) and win 1 game in BTT, maybe 2.

To wit: Here is the SAGARIN as of today....

1 Indiana = 94.30 24 3 77.33( 52) 7 1 | 8 3 | 93.76 1 | 94.79 2
5 Michigan = 90.91 22 4 78.91( 13) 4 4 | 8 4 | 91.67 2 | 90.18 8
8 Ohio State = 89.80 20 7 78.82( 14) 4 6 | 5 7 | 89.91 9 | 89.58 11
9 Michigan State = 89.63 21 6 80.32( 2) 5 5 | 7 6 | 90.00 8 | 89.19 12
10 Wisconsin = 89.55 19 8 80.28( 3) 4 5 | 8 8 | 88.74 12 | 90.40 7
23 Minnesota = 85.83 18 9 80.70( 1) 2 6 | 5 8 | 85.89 25 | 85.65 24
40 Illinois = 84.20 19 9 79.59( 5) 4 7 | 5 7 | 84.35 36 | 83.94 42
41 Iowa = 84.00 17 10 76.56( 70) 2 6 | 3 7 | 83.86 43 | 84.02 41

65 Purdue = 80.16 13 14 78.49( 23) 0 7 | 2 9 | 80.39 63 | 79.83 70
116 Northwestern = 76.48 13 15 78.70( 18) 1 6 | 3 10 | 77.81 97 | 75.13 128
118 Nebraska = 76.11 13 14 78.72( 17) 0 8 | 1 11 | 76.97 108 | 75.17 126

You could probably make the same breakdown for every team in the conference

As tempting as it is to look at what-ifs that way, Iowa also could have easily lost some of the games it won, so in the end, your record is your record. I think about the 2010 football team the same way. As other posters have stated, every team could make cases for games it should have won or let slip away. That said, there is no doubt that Iowa has lost an inordinate amount of close games and an argument could be made from a probability standpoint that the Iowa team is "better" than its record.

In terms of the NCAA, my personal take is that if our only remaining regular season loss is IU, AND we win at least one B10 tourney game, we squeak in. Of course, that will depend a lot on what other teams do as well, but the reputation of the B10 conference will help us. The voters have already stated that the focus is on picking the best teams period, and that "balancing out" the conferences is not part of the discussion.