An argument could made why even bother rooting for VT? If we win, we win... so rooting has no impact. The point of rooting is to "wish the success of or lend support to someone or something".

If your conference does well in out of conference games, it massively increases the margin of error for your own team. It also increases the earnings of the conference, which trickles down to the your team.

There is a reason that most conferences only receive 1 bid to the tournament. It's because their teams do poorly out of conference, thus there is no margin of error.

Seems very straightforward.