Conf. Pride
Which wouldn't be such a big deal if people put their school first, then most everyone else, then conference teams last like you're supossed to.
Well, for arguments sake (and i'm kind of thinking "out loud" here), I think it might be a little bit different when you're a fan of a mid-major school. It's easy to hate all the other teams in your conference if you're school is in the ACC, SEC, Big X/XII/East, etc because you know that you're pretty much at the top tier of college athletics and if you have a great season, the opportunities are going to be there for you.
When you're on the outside looking in at the BCS and you're not one of those top top programs, sometimes the success of other schools in your conference is also a success for your school. Nobody is going to not take the SEC seriously, or the Big XII. Not really. But the more seriously mid-majors have their conference taken, the more likely it is that they can gain the inside track on moving up. For example, when the whole BigEast/ACC/CUSA realignment went down in 2003 and the Big East drew from CUSA to gain more members, a couple of schools really benefitted from how competitive CUSA had been the previous few years. Sure, Louisville had made a name for itsself mostly on its own accord, but Cincinnati and South Florida hadn't done much of anything up to that point in football, yet here they are now in a BCS conference.
It's more or less a conflict of interests from my standpoint I suppose. I don't like rooting for anyone in our conference because I want us to be the best, but at the same time our administration sucks and we might need to ride some coattails at some point. :hihi: