When you slow the game down, you take away more possessions, so that limits the amount of points you can potentially lose by. Basically, you're not going to get blown out too much.
From what I saw of UNI in the tourney was a disorganized offense and a lot of 3 balls. If those are falling, UNI looks pretty good. When they're not, they look pretty ugly. Overall, it was a pretty ugly effort. I was really thinking UNI was going to get 2 down there or at the very least 1.