Rankings
Rankings are done by your selected conference. You will be protected in pool seeding from other members of your conference, as per position in your conference.
Conferences that do not have sufficient representation in the championship may be merged through best guess with other conferences.
The largest three conferences (in terms of competition participation) will have their #1 team protected from each other.
Absolutely no attempt will be made to consider relative strength of conferences, or relative strength of teams not seeded in the same conference.
This is how it has been done for over 10 years. Complaints that do not come with code, test-cases, correct statistical analysis, and peer-reviewed published paper(s) in major journals will be met with stern indifference.