Count me definitely in favor of having regular season champs and not tournament champs in automatically. I get the many reasons it won't (don't think you can even have a tournament that doesn't count against regular season games totals if the winner isn't for the NCAA Tournament), but to me, the conference champ is decided in the regular season. The conference tournaments are fun little events to end with, but not half as important.

Heck, if I had it my way, we'd have the conference tournaments as the first events of the year instead of the last, as kind of an intro to the basketball year.