OOC games are insturmental in shaping the NCAA tournament. They basically establish the foundation of the tournament:
- Which conferences will dominate top seeds and which will get middling seeds.
- You can also typically get a very sound estimate of seeds by conferences by end of December, without even identifying individual teams.
The reason is that once teams only play each other they can't really improve much in the metrics as a group.
But with such a small number of OOC games likely happening this year I am not sure what will the impact be. I could see less of a reliance on metrics for seeding and more reliance on conference record, and less metrics used for seeding... i.e. they will treat champions in power conferences more of the same then normal when it comes to seeding.