The Atlantic Coast Conference began to develop a strategic plan for its future more than a year ago, and a central part of the plan involves expansion. The ACC's television contracts with ESPN and ABC will be up shortly. Bringing in a Miami would surely bolster the league's negotiating position, in, given the current economy, what will be a tough market (and no, the guys with the sharp pencils at ESPN didn't ask me to write that).

The question that the league must answer is whether a pie with 10, or, should Boston College and Syracuse follow Miami, 12 slices, would be more filling than the current nine-slice pie. Will an ACC championship game, and the revenue that would come from having more games to sell to the networks, be sufficient to support three more teams?

The proposed ACC expansion makes sense in purely football terms. It would lift the ACC. Miami is a perennial power, and Boston College and Syracuse have tradition and history not unlike that in Maryland, Clemson and North Carolina. But would an expanded ACC muscle out the Big Ten, the SEC, the Big 12 or the Pac-10? Some years, perhaps. More years than not? No. A few years ago, former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer, in responding to a question about the makeup of Division I-A, asked, "What teams were national powers 30 years ago? Michigan, Texas, Alabama. What teams are powers now?" An expanded ACC would be an improved football product, but it will still be a basketball league.

The Big East, without Miami, Boston College and Syracuse, would be in severe trouble. I'm not sure there's enough blood in Division I-A for a transfusion to keep Big East football alive. One alternative to this scenario: the Big East jettisons the schools that play only basketball. Goodbye, Georgetown, Villanova, Seton Hall, St. John's, Providence. A league without them makes a lot of football sense. It's not as attractive as a basketball entity, and the Big East members would have to decide which is more important.

When the last round of ACC expansion talk began several years ago, the football schools within the ACC mustered only five of the seven votes they needed. Now they have six. The old-line schools worried about changing the character of ACC basketball. As the SEC and Big 12 have discovered, you can't play home-and-home with every team in a 12-team conference. What about having fewer ACC Basketball Tournament tickets with which to lure the heavy-hitting donors?

Last year, Miami president Donna Shalala assured her fellow Big East chief executives that the school had no interest in the ACC. No one knows why the school has begun discussions again. Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese gambled that he could stop the desertions from his league by taking his concerns public, forcing the ACC to take the pie out of the oven before the three new slices are ready.

The game is on.

Ivan Maisel is a senior writer at ESPN.com. He can be reached at ivan.maisel@espn3.com.