Well I'm only level 17 online but I'm just a couple of tournaments short of all elite gold medals in the HD campaign (mostly for lack of time for trying harder).
People can be moderately experienced and yet have spent very little time online as it is my case.
I always loose at least by about 5-10 seconds to the average/good pilots and usually beat newbies by 5-10 seconds. I guess this makes me mid/low level tier but I was consistently placing better than a level 34 player yesterday. I just probably played more offline than him.