One of the methodologies I had in mind would apply to conferences like that, though it would vary year to year based on non-conference play. Say all games through the end of December (OOC only) are considered in calculating a coefficient for each conference that determines its number of bids. So yes, it moves up the whining about which conference got too many bids and which got too few to that point, but at least every team goes into their last ~20 games knowing exactly what they need to do to get in. If the Big East has 3 bids and Seton Hall comes in 4th, there's no room to complain because the goalposts were clear and didn't move. Ultimately I'd say leave it up to the conferences to determine how they want to allocate their bids, but I expect for the most part it would be tournament champion then go to regular season standings.