The disconnect with ISU fans and SOS is that they believe it has a giant impact on their record. They seem to think their 3-9 would flip to 9-3 with Iowa's schedule. That is simply not the case.
The most maddening thing about it is that ISU is a good engineering school, but their fan base shows little numeracy, and cherry picks numbers to back their claims.
Look at this thread. CyCity has said more than once that a two-team B12 expansion could turn a 6-7 win season into 8-9. Those were his numbers.
Changing two teams on the schedule doesn't turn two guaranteed losses into two guaranteed wins. Lets pretend to remove Texas/Oklahoma from ISU's schedule and replace with BYU/Cincy. ISU's expected win total for UT/OU in the average year is something like 0.5. For BYU/Cincy, I will be super duper nice and say it is 1.2. That is a gain of 0.7 wins. It is not a huge 2 win jump. Even in an extreme year, it would raise their expected win total by one game.
Last year, they kept crying that Iowa was terrible and were beneficiaries of a weak schedule, attempting to argue that Iowa had a MAC-level schedule. Well, look at computer rankings. And, by computer rankings, I don't mean that you should find one single computer ranking that suits your argument, you should use a wide range of rankings, or, even better, and index of computer rankings.
Well, masseyratings.com compiles over 100 different computer rankings. The final compilation from last year had 117. The final ranking, which included the MSU and Stanford losses, ranked Iowa 13th in the country. Not 40th, like ISU fans claim, but 13th.
http://www.masseyratings.com/cf/compare.htm
The final regular season ranking had Iowa 7th. This was 120 computer rankings, which handle SOS a lot better than any human who looks at a schedule and snorts.
http://www.masseyratings.com/cf/arch/compare2015-13.htm
ISU finished 81st. Sure, they had a lot of good teams on their schedule, but they don't beat middle-of-the-road teams either. They beat #48 Texas, #83 UNI, and #165 Kansas.
They lost to #36 WVU, #63 KSU, #45 TTU, and #33 Toledo. Those are the types of wins that ISU fans would give Iowa zero credit for.
I don't know why I wasted my time typing this.