I will say, they didn't seem very good when we played them. They looked liked they sucked, like a middle of the pack MAC team. MAC teams are sometimes really good, and you can tell when they are, and NIU definitely wasn't that.
The way the season has gone, I feel like the NIU loss is irrelevant. It's a blemish, but it doesn't make us seem like we suck, on account of how we've pretty much rolled everyone else. Louisville being the only team to sort of give us a game. So it comes off like a fluke. And it's definitely way better that we beat A&M and proved ourselves, and had a stupid, random loss to NIU, than the other way around. A high value win being way more useful than avoiding a 'bad loss'.