No, they are not. I'm talking more generally. I think this will be a 4ish bid league with 5 teams generally vying for those 5 spots. In "off years" it gets 2-3. In great years maybe 5 but Temple isn't getting a bid this year. In some respects, this is the A-10 2.0. A bunch of pretty good teams at the top and a bunch of pretty terrible ones bringing up the rear.
Its true that there aren't X-bid leagues. What we're talking about is more a case of averages or typicals which in any given year can be modified. It is really a measure of league strength/depth. Occasionally some lesser conference snags 2 bids, but it is normally a 1-bid league. Sometimes a power conference gets 3 rather than its usual 6-7, but those are outliers.
That's not the direction of this discussion. It's been, this is a 3-4 bid league going forward, so we better be sure we're one of those three or four. And that's just not at all how it works.
Of course there is not a quota. The AAc gets 4, the MAAC gets 1, the Big East gets 3. But leagues establish themselves over time as falling within a range. In any given year the Big 10 might get 3 and the AAC 6, but over the long haul, you can more or less predict with some accuracy how many bids a given league will get. And in part because of how RPI works and how Strength of Schedule is over weighted in the formula (there have been several analytic pieces on this subject recently, though they tend to be in statistical journals rather than sporting ones so they get little play) conference strength tends to be a self-fulfilling prophesy and that contributes to the number of bids.
@Uconn is the best win they will get unless win @Cincy/Memphis
