Often, matchups in games come down to how well one team's lineup counters the other's. Our lineup was particularly effective against them, and they didn’t have many answers for us. However, they performed much better against Alabama and Auburn than we did. Overall, they are a better team than us. In matchups against most teams, their overall competitiveness is definitely higher than ours.
And even in the 22-23 season, we were pretty average, yet we still swept Tennessee. Does that mean we were better than Tennessee that year? Tennessee was a 4-seed, while we were at one point projected to miss the tournament and ended up as a 6-seed. Again, overall competitiveness should be evaluated based on the entire resume against various teams.