This is so crazy to me.
It is a bit different now that the Big Ten is dead (if we were fighting UCLA and Maryland for this title I wouldn't care nearly as much), but generally speaking I just feel like objectively the conference regular season is a greater honor that says more about the quality of a team than anything short of a Final Four (you could even argue more so than a Final Four, but it is the nature of CBB that FF is a "go down for eternity" metric).
CBB fans wildly overvalue tournament success imho. I badly do not want football to become like that.
Long rant incoming, lol, as I also find the "only the postseason matters" attitude incredibly sad and an indictment on so much of the "mystique" of college sports being lost in the last decade plus. I generally agree with your last statement, and I H-A-T-E the relatively new yet mostly prevalent attitude among college sports fans that teams who haven't
literally won a National Championship "haven't done anything." That might sound like a ridiculous strawman, but you see this all the time with comments about Oregon Football, and while I get that it is trolling ... that is sort of the point. To say something like Oregon Football's financial investments in its programs have "amounted to nothing" because they haven't won a National Championship is such a low IQ take, lol. College sports are supposed to be about pageantry and tradition, and I generally find that the more intelligent and thoughtful a sports fan is, the more he/she will give praise to a wider range of programs for their accomplishments. If you are not in awe of the 1990s Braves because they "only" won one World Series, well ... your opinion should be considered so ridiculously casual as to be irrelevant.
With that said, I will say that I think there are tiers based on a program's current situation. In 2021, I can honestly say I cared way more about winning the BTT than making the Sweet Sixteen. Given how we were screwed out of a regular season title, I REALLY wanted that group to be able to hang a banner. In fact, I honestly don't think I had ever heard the term "make the Second Weekend" until it became a constantly used attack term used by rival fan bases (especially Michigan) to trash an Illini Basketball program that was CLEARLY back yet just happened to have lost in the Second Round two years in a row. For all of my sports life, each round of the NCAA Tournament was its own island to me and most fans I knew ... losing in the Second Round was better than in the First Round, losing in the Sweet Sixteen was better than the Second Round, losing in the Elite Eight was better than the Sweet Sixteen, etc. There wasn't this magical wall of "success" that came with making a Sweet Sixteen. The only exception was making the Final Four, given the extreme level of pageantry and celebration involved with that feat; everything before it was just varying degrees of a good season that fell short of a Final Four.
In 2022, I cared way more about winning the Big Ten regular season (once it was on the table) than how we did in the NCAA Tournament. We hadn't won one in 17 years, and the aforementioned screw job from 2021 was still fresh. I also had started to have a sort of 2006-esque feeling with that team by early March where we just seemed like a low floor/low ceiling squad that would sort of blend in with our program's good history, so I was glad they got some sort of eternal recognition with a championship of some kind. I was annoyed by the haters talking about "another Second Round loss" and really wanted to make it to the Sweet Sixteen, sure ... but instead of a conference championship?? No way.
However ... fast forward to 2023 and especially 2024, and I very much was swayed by the idea of getting the Sweet Sixteen monkey off of our backs. Winning the BTT was awesome, but I would have been epically disappointed if we went down in the Second Round yet again. It was so nice to finally see our name in the bracket in the later stages when the nation's eyes were focused on an increasingly small number of teams. So, I understand the sentiment. With that said, though ... we have already done all of that during this Underwood renaissance. BTT banner? Check. Regular season banner? Check. First Round NBA Draft picks? Check. "Deep" March Madness run? Check. So, with the obvious exception of treating a Final Four (and even more obviously a National Championship victory!) as this sort of end-all accomplishment, I truly don't get at this point not viewing each individual accomplishment sort of "in its own lane" - separate little trophies our storied program can add to the trophy case without sacrificing our prospects for other accomplishments!
