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[QUOTE="jncuse, post: 1967278, member: 1969"]
As some have probably noted I do have great interest in watching how the tournament field develops over the course of a year.

The period between the start of the season until January 1st, essentially establishes the frame for the tournament.    [B]It's not individual teams that distinguish themselves now, but it is the conferences that really improve the chances of their members.[/B]  How conferences perform the next 2 months will have a high correlation to what conference has the most seeds and what conference dominates the pod seeds.

While a team's individual RPI may not matter that much come tourney time, the tournament does look at RPI for quality wins.   So teams just beat on each other and get more top 50 wins.

The best example is the PAC-12 last year.  While they had no dominate teams in pre-season, almost the entire conference performed quite well (If I remember correctly, 11 of their schools were in the top 75 in RPI entering conference play).  That just allows them to beat on each other have a bunch of top 50 wins, and makes it hard to get bad losses.  The PAC-12 also benefited last year from the decline of the Mountain West.   
But in recent years the PAC-12 has also had seasons of only 2-4 teams.   And this was because the conference did very poorly in November and December.

People here have also pissed on the new Big East, but as long as they have a high Conference RPI entering season play, they will get 4-6 teams in the tourney.

How does this impact Syracuse?   Last year it certainly mattered as a bubble team.    Hopefully for this year, it is only impacting us in terms of where we get seeded in the POD.   Point is that we should be cheering for the ACC to win every out of conference game.   But I don't always -- I would rather see Duke lose.
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