Blame the conference for holding the tourney in the first place. It's a waste of time. You have teams play a 30-game conference schedule--30 games!---and then say, OK, now, let's have a tournament, too--and give the winner an automatic bid? It's dumb. The tourney won't affect our NCAA seeding. There is nothing for the top-tier conference teams to play for, and they know it. When you've just finished playing 30 games against all or most of your conference foes, you don't need even more games to determine who should be in the NCAA tourney.