Are a bad, bad, bad idea.  Same with conference title games.  Regular season play should decide a conference champion.

Here's why.

It's not going to happen, but Heisman Pundit touched upon a more reliable and equitable way to manage the conferences in an entry from late November:

2. Conference Reform

This one is simple. There should be the same amount of teams in every conference. No more of the Big East having eight teams and the SEC having 12 and the Pac-10 having 10. This creates distortions in the schedules which in turn distorts the BCS rankings.

Every major conference should have 10 teams and there should be 12 conferences (mathematically easy with the coming edition of Western Kentucky to 1-A). Then, every conference should play a round-robin schedule, meaning that each team faces every other team within the conference. There would be no conference championship games, so the winner of the conference would be the true winner. Every team would have nine conference games and three non-conference games, which would be determined by the aforementioned scheduling system and a rotating series between conferences (Big Ten vs. SEC; Big 12 vs. Big East, etc.). At the end of the season, there would be 12 true conference champions and the top teams still standing will have truly earned their keep.

Anyone think the USD basketball team earned its keep in the regular season relative to Gonzaga or St. Mary's?

Selection time hasn't begun and already the NCAA Tournament is flawed.  Now, the BCS isn't much better, but that's the whole point.  The supposed model for all things right about a tournament has and always will be deeply flawed.  It's a one-and-done crapshoot that reveals little about anything other than chaos.  It's fun, but it's not representative of anything.  It's silly instead of serious.  It lacks depth, which perhaps explains why Billy Packer's there lording over all of it.