I'm on record saying that we aren't a great team, but were not ducking competition either. Why can't Iowa go to a meaningful November/December tournament. Other than the Midlands.
Because there aren't really a ton of meaningful tourneys in Nov, and they face some pretty tough compeition Jan-March.
The flip side to them facing non-DI compeition is think of what that does for wrestling as a whole. Think of how many people go to the Luther Open because the top ranked Iowa Hawkeyes will be there. Iowa does some good for the state of wrestling by going to that in Nov, that can't be overlooked.
As for why don't they go to Cliff-Keen, they will wrestle at least 5 of the top ten finishing teams from that tourney (depending on what happens at Nat'l duals they could see more). Maybe they should go to that one, I don't have an answer.
They were banking on being able to wrestle UNI two weeks ago, which cost them from wrestling another dual. The past few years they had wrestled teams like Lehigh, Edinboro, Buffalo, etc, but they opted to try and wrestle Schwab, but got turned down. What more can they do if they try to schedule a dual with an up-and-coming program, but they didn't want to?
I'll finish on telling you to look at their second semester schedule. They wrestle the Midlands Dec 29-30, three days later they travel out to wrestle Rutgers in NJ, two days later they are in Ohio for OSU. The next weekend they travel to Stillwater. In Feb they travel to Maryland and then get PSU a few days later. This is a team that will be doing a lot of second half travel, so trying to get a local early season dual (with UNI) was the optimal thing for this team. Otherwise they would be starting their traveling grind earlier and the wrestlers would have had no breather.