Interesting study. Thanks for doing this.
My current conclusion, is that like a lot of things at D3, good coaching can overcome a glaring weakness and a team can be competitive and even make the NT with a big shortfall in a key area. At the same time, while competitive on the whole, the teams with the glaring weakness will get exposed against the truly good and very good teams who game plan.
Currently at D3, there are enough SIM teams combined with teams coached by humans who either aren't very good or don't care to gameplan in regular season that an active team by a seasoned coach should win a fair number of games.
I've seen this across the board for weaknesses. Teams with awful defense or awful ath, for instance, will finish with 20+ wins, a top 30 RPI but then come NT time, they never make a run and looking at individual game results, get blown out by good teams.
This also happens at the individual level. It is what causes some of the value of ind. ratings debates. A player with 20 ath and 70 spd, but 85+ per, CAN avg. 20+ points effeciently by feasting on the good matchups. But that same player will get completely shutdown when it plays a very good team who game plans.
The same is happening here. The team is wining the games against SIM teams and being competitive and winning against some human teams, but if it played top teams on a regular basis, it the results would show that the games are not nearly as close as they should be for a team of its abilities.
The takeaway is this: IQ (and for that matter Ath/Def) can be overcome against the majority of the cannon fodder that permeates this game. At that level, good coaching and good overall numbers matters more than any individual trait. BUT, once you get to the elite level (i.e., teams consistently going to Sweet 16+), every rating must be perfectly fine tuned or you will lose and lose badly more often than not. So, there is a bit of a cliff dividing the elite from everyone else. The difference between good teams and elite teams don't look like very much on paper (just a few ath points here, some defense there, higher IQs) but make a ton of difference at that level. Those teams are just more consistent regardless of the opponent.
This all makes sense when you understand that this game is just one large probability equation. Any individual factor merely affects the probability odds for every calculation. Thus, a team weak in a key factor, but very strong elsewhere, will remain competitive because the probability factor of maximizing the ratings is lower, but the ratings still carry more often than not.
A player with an IQ of F will still make the right play 60% of the time (or thereabouts considering that even 1 practice period at 10 or so minutes moves an IQ from F to D-). But the computer doesn't view it as "right" or "wrong" play they way it happens in the real world. The computer instead says, how close to best result will this player get. 60% of the time, the player will maximize its ratings, and 40% of the time, it will be something less (but not zero). The player with A rating, will maximize his ratings 90% of the time. That said, if the player with IQ of F is sufficiently better than player with IQ of A, even if F is only functioning at reduced capacity, it will still often be better than player A.