It's kind of dumb these teams that have the auto bid but to play in the play in game
Not really.
If you actually look at most of the autoqualifiers that end up in play in games most years, theyre not just there because theyre from small conferences. Theyre usually there because despite winning their tournament, they also have a poor resume, including plenty of bad losses.
For example, Mount Saint Marys, they might not be a 16 seed if they had not gone 0-8 against the top 100, and 1-2 against the 100-200 range. Even then, you might be able to excuse the top 100 losses because they had to play most of those on the road. However, they also lost 5 games to sub-200 teams, including one sub 300 level loss.
By the principles of seeding, the worst seeds should have the hardest path. MSM
earned one of the worst seeds through having no good wins and having a slew of extremely bad losses.
You'll find similar if you look at most of the other 15 and 16 seeds. Almost always they
earned those poor seeds. By normal seeding principles all the first four should be the worst seeded teams. The only reason theyre not is that nobody would watch those games if it were all 16 seeds. And yes, they won a conference tournament, but lets be honest, any of the at larges, and honestly most that are relegated to the NIT, would run the table in those tournaments too. If they want better? Even if they can't help the schedule, perform better against what they had. Largely 16 seeds
did not do that.