Though conference strength plays a role in the quality of the wins within conference, or it does not?
You’ve got it backwards basically. The strength of a conference in based on how good the teams are within it. In tourney terms, we’re most interested in the distribution of Quad 1-4 teams (yes, that’s an oversimplification) and how many teams are tourney quality, roughly top 50 or so. A conference doesn’t offer quality wins because it is a good conference, it is a good conference because it allows quality wins. This may seem pedantic, but it’s important because a tourney team isn’t just trying to rack up a good record in a good conference, they are trying to collect quality wins. It’s the games that matter, not the conference they take place in.
And I don’t think using conference quality and record is a good heuristic at all. The easiest thing to do is go glance at what Joe Lunardi or the other major bracketologists are saying at any given time. Their projections are accurate enough to essentially be a correct projection under current conditions who is going to be in. If you want to go a step deeper, look at the sites that are comparing quad wins and losses vs the other teams on the bubble and look at KenPom.
Looking at conference record is messy though to subtract information from this approach. If the Big Ten has 5 top 50 teams who will make the tournament and 8 teams in the 51-90 range who will miss it, it doesn’t make it a better conference if one team goes from 52 to 48 and makes it a 6 bid league while the other 7 teams all crash to 150+. It also doesn’t make it really a worse league if a tourney bubble team slips and falls just out of the tourney because all the bad teams turned out to be pretty good.
This is a long and pretty lazily articulated rant. Basically, thinking about conference quality determining quality wins is backwards and has a poor signal to noise ratio compared to these other easier methods to track your team’s progress.
