I hadn't looked at the resumes of any bubble teams, so decided to take a peek. What separates Iowa from most of the teams in Lunardi's "Last Four" or "First Four" categories is that Iowa either has more wins against the Top 50 and/or fewer bad losses (to teams outside of the Top 100).
A couple other resumes stood out to me, though. Unless I'm missing something, these resumes look pretty similar to Iowa's.
St. Joes (Currently listed as "Last 4 In"):
NCAA College Basketball RPI Rankings - ESPN
Stanford (Currently listed as "Last 4 Byes"):
NCAA College Basketball RPI Rankings - ESPN
Iowa (Lock?):
NCAA College Basketball RPI Rankings - ESPN
Iowa has the weakest non-conference SOS of the bunch, but St. Joe's is the weakest in overall SOS. Iowa is just behind Stanford. Both are Top 25 there.
ESPN RPI: Iowa (39), Stanford (43), St. Joe's (48)
NCAA RPI (supposedly the official one): Iowa (49), Stanford (43), St. Joe's (42)
I don't know. Iowa seems to be in decent shape compared to the teams listed as "On the Bubble" in Bracketology, but I still say that they aren't as far from the bubble as most people are saying... Better take care of business Thursday IMO.
If I'm missing something here, please point it out.
Edit: Even with a loss to NW, I still think Iowa stacks up favorably against most of the other teams listed as "on the bubble", which bodes well, but as I said in another thread, I don't want to see the Hawks test that theory.