i didnt want to waste your time on what might be considered a stupid thing to ask about... i dont undertsand how you get into a conference,why are they there,why do some of the conferecnces have a really small chance of getting to the tournement, whats the big 12, does every team only play its conference or every team, can you move conferences.....
So pretty much the whole kit and kaboodle! I'm not actually sure there would be a great site to explain all of that. Maybe somewhere, but it's not too hard to give a brief rundown.
Conferences are voluntary associations between college athletic programs. For the most part, conference associations extend across all sporting programs, or at least the major ones (meaning if you're in the Big-12, you're in the Big-12 for basketball, for football, for baseball, for gymnastics...etc.) There are often financial reasons for teams to associate into conferences (for instance, negotiating a television rights deal for the entire conference can be more lucrative than each individual school trying to do so), but the main consequence of conferences is that teams within a conference agree to play every year. Usually conference membership coincides with general regions to some extent, because if you group with schools that are nearby and play them every year, you don't have to travel as much. For instance, the original Pac-8 (now the Pac-12) was composed of schools that were on or near the Pacific coast, and traveling to those schools every year is a lot easier than traveling all the way across the country. In addition to geographical concerns, schools tend to want to associate with schools of approximately the same athletic caliber - you don't want to be a great basketball school in a conference full of push-overs.
As I said, conference membership is voluntary, and there are a few schools who don't have conference associations (right now 10 in basketball, but none are major programs). Membership is kind of like a club. A handful of schools get together and start their "club". If anybody else wants to join, they have to get permission to join from the current members of the club. It's really as simple as that. Conference membership tends to be stable on about a ten-year scale, or so. Teams can and do move conferences occasionally, however. Recently the Big-12 has undergone a bit of a shakeup such that there are now only 10 teams, and this shakeup is partially responsible for the Big Ten now having 12 teams (a delicious absurdity in which neither conference wants to change their historic name!). The Pac-10 added two teams last year but reasonably changed its name to the Pac-12.
For basketball, the schedule is generally broken down into the "non-conference schedule", usually played between mid-November and late December, and the "conference schedule", which goes from late December to late February. During the non-conference schedule, teams are free to play whatever teams they like, which means that you'll see different matchups every year, though most schools will have one or more traditional non-conference rivals they schedule most years. Most teams play about 10-15 non-conference games. Then the conference portion of the schedule comes up and teams play against the others in their conference. The conference schedule is usually about 16-20 games long. All conferences have a different system for how they do this, but it usually ensures that everybody plays everybody else in the conference at least once in the season, and that over the long run (several seasons) home and away matchups between two teams are equalized. The Pac-10 had a particularly elegant scheduling system which equalized all of this within each season, but when they became the Pac-12 it was no longer possible. Also, in some conferences (the Pac-12 is an example) teams will have one or two "open dates" during their conference schedule when they are able to schedule non-conference games.
The reason that some conferences have a smaller chance of getting teams into the tournament is due to the fact that conferences group themselves by overall strength of the teams. If my count is right, there are 31 conferences, but the minor conferences are unlikely to have strong enough teams to "deserve" to get a team into the tournament. Thus, tournament bids are split into two types - the "automatic bid", and the "at-large bid". Every conference, no matter how major or minor, gets exactly one automatic bid, which is given to the conference winner. Conferences decide themselves whether that bid goes to the winner of the regular season, or whether they have a post-season tournament to decide the bid. Beyond that, the remainder of the bids are given out (in theory) without respect to conference membership, but only with respect to team strength. But since the strong teams are gathered together in only a few conferences, those conferences are likely to get a majority of the "at-large" tournament bids.
The major basketball conferences are traditionally:
A-10 (Atlantic 10
ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference)
Big-12
Big East
Big Ten
PAC-12 (Pacific Athletic Conference 12)
SEC (Southeastern Conference)
There are also a few conferences that are "mid-majors" - pretty strong:
C-USA (Conference USA)
Horizon
MVC (Missouri Valley Conference)
MWC (Mountain West Conference)
WCC (West Coast Conference)
WAC (Western Athletic Conference)
These conferences have a bit more ebb and flow to their strength than the majors, so sometimes one will sort of drop out of the scene and another will come on. But there's nothing hard and fast about these categorizations, and somebody else might argue that one conference or another doesn't belong in the lists I gave.