My favorite part about the ongoing Big 12 expansion saga is how often it compels people to state the obvious.

The most recent and notable example of that came earlier this week when Oklahoma president David Boren, speaking after the Oklahoma board of regents meeting Wednesday night, so eloquently declared that Big 12 expansion was not a given.

Terrific. Glad we got that cleared up.

Of course it’s not a given. If it were, it would’ve been done long before now.

There’s even a decent argument to be made that it SHOULD have been done long before now. If that were the case, KU might be opening its Big 12 football slate at Louisville in a couple of weeks or looking ahead to a January basketball match-up between Rick Pitino and Bill Self. Instead, the Cardinals and all-world quarterback Lamar Jackson are doing their thing in the ACC and the Big 12 is sifting through a pool of less-than-desirable expansion candidates.

I’ll give Boren this: For a man who has never been shy about opening his mouth and stoking the fires of one of the hottest topics ever to hit college athletics, his recent comments show a certain level of progress back toward reality and indicate he may have learned something from his past mistakes.

There’s nothing wrong with Boren stating the obvious if the obvious is true. And, in this case, it most certainly is.

The next meeting of the Big 12 board of directors is now just a month out and, although commissioner Bob Bowlsby has gone on record saying he would like for there to be a vote of some kind regarding expansion at that meeting, this conference hardly seems like it’s ready to move ahead with that four weeks from now.

Reports have indicated that the vote may not even happen and that all 10 members of the conference at least have some concerns about where the expansion process currently stands.

That won’t keep the speculation or politicking from running wild, though. What’s the fun in that?

Fans, coaches and administrators from those schools still deemed to be “in the running” continue to try to put their best foot forward in an effort to impress and inspire the Big 12 to bring them into the conference. Can’t blame them for that.

But the impassioned pleas of those schools desiring a spot, Boren admitted, may go for naught.

“I’m also listening to fans, not just to our coaches and AD and other people,” he said. “How do they feel about it? Are they excited about the expansion pool…. I’ve sometimes described the league moving at glacial speed in the past, but I think the main thing is for us to be thoughtful.”

The funny part about that statement is this: The fans, coaches and even ADs have next to no say in all of this. Heck, even Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby is having a difficult time in this mess and he’s the one who was hired to lead it. Instead of being an open process which equally values the input of those who run the schools and those who know the most about college athletics, the current expansion talk is being driven and decided in the offices of Big 12 presidents and chancellors, good news for some schools and awful news for others.

So again we wait. What exactly we’re waiting for certainly is open to interpretation and remains to be seen.

Some believe we’re waiting on the Big 12 to pick the schools with which it wants to move forward, be that two new members or four. Others believe we’re waiting on some kind of Hail Mary that magically presents more attractive expansion candidates. And still others believe we’re waiting for the Big 12 to do nothing.

Regardless of which of those reads is right — or, perhaps more fittingly, if they all are — the man who has been the least prudent in all of this, at least in the public eye, suddenly is banging the drum for the Big 12 to be more thoughtful.

The problem is, if you have to give too much thought to which schools you want or even whether the conference should expand at all, doesn’t that kind of answer the question for you?