So we’re making the rounds of annual conference meetings with the requisite previews and reviews and the silence is both deafening and expected.

As brow-arching as the Big Ten meetings were — or seemed to be at the outset, given the environment it’s created — the Big East congregation is no less interesting.

They’ll talk about actual conference matters — new basketball tournament format? — but they also have a duty to put a lot of the expansion discourse on the table, too. What can they really do? Truthfully, almost nothing, though wheels can at the very least be put in place to later be put in motion … and that assumes the need ever arises.

Anyhow, in preparation for and in the midst of these meetings there have been a number of interviews and conversations and emails and texts and the like with people in different positions in relation to different conferences. One person (Edit: By the way, not quoted in the linked-to story, just to be clear) who’s going to have a voice in expansion made a point I at first dismissed and have since given consideration: “Who said the Big Ten had to go first?”

That’s … that’s not crazy.