MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — Allow me to be exceptionally candid with you about what’s going on here at the Southeastern Conference spring meeting.

There is a tsunami of information, opinion, facts and speculation coming out of the meetings here, enough to swamp my little boat of a brain several times over.

College Football Playoff formats. SEC football scheduling formats. NCAA governance. The House settlement. And then in one corner you have Georgia coach Kirby Smart practically banging the news conference podium saying that the biggest issue facing the game is fixing the transfer portal. There should be just one window, he said, preferably opening after a national champion is crowned. I agree.

Trouble is, there is not much that anyone seems to agree on, inside or outside the SEC. I’m not sure if the representatives from all 16 schools can agree that the sand on the beach outside the Sandestin Hilton is sugary white. (Somehow, the sand in the golf bunkers here is a dull gray. First-world problems, I know.)

Smart’s worries aside, the biggest worry I have for college athletics is on the macro-est of macro scales. To wit, that there are so many issues, so many problems to solve, there is a lot of dithering and stalling and procrastinating to get anything accomplished. Much talking, not much doing.

I sat down with LSU athletic director Scott Woodward here Wednesday afternoon to chat about the big issues and where things are likely headed with the CFP format and SEC scheduling and the like. His blanket answer was basically, “I don’t know.” And I thought it was a genuine response, because there are so many different points of view inside and outside of the SEC house.

We all look at universities and colleges and the presidents and faculty and administrators and coaches that run things and expect them to be all-knowing. We see SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey at the podium and figure he has some grand plan for the SEC and where all of college sports is going with the CFP and SEC football and NCAA governance and NIL and the House settlement and (in his spare time) curing warts.

In reality, no one really knows where this is going. How many sports will survive because schools are now having to pay millions in revenue sharing to athletes? How many lawsuits will erupt over the breakdown of how the revenue is shared? And whether the SEC and Big Ten will make former LSU Chancellor Mike Martin’s prediction come true (“I think we could ultimately end up with two conferences: one called ESPN and one called Fox.”).

LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey, with her folksy wisdom, probably has the whole situation pegged as well as anyone:

“What’s going on right now with all of this is like we’re flying an airplane for the first time and we don’t really know how to work all the instruments in the plane,” she said Tuesday. “We are literally learning as we go, and it’s going to be very interesting to watch this unfold.”

Let’s take one stair step at a time.

It all starts with the House settlement, which could come any day (it was expected to come last week). That will influence the CFP format — likely expanding from 12 teams to 14 or 16 — and how qualifiers are determined. The SEC and Big Ten have appeared to be pushing for four automatic qualifiers each, but a lot of SEC football coaches apparently are warming to the “5-11 model” that would feature the top five conference champions plus 11 at-large spots.

Ultimately, someone will be unhappy. As Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin correctly surmised, “There’s still flaws in every system.”

Whatever CFP format takes place will shape the SEC schedule format with nine games or eight. It seems inconceivable, if reports are correct that ESPN is offering the SEC an extra $50 million to 80 million per year for a ninth game, that the league’s members would turn that cash down. But there are schools that want to cling to the eight-game conference schedule, worried about being bowl eligible. Yes, there’s still part of the world that worries about bowls. And everyone in the SEC seems to be paranoid about the CFP selection committee picking teams strictly based on the “right-hand column” as Brian Kelly described it — the loss column — and not paying enough attention to strength of schedule.

You even hear an occasional shout for bringing back the BCS-era computer rankings, cold calculations that were unpopular in their day.

College athletics has changed enormously since Joe Burrow led LSU to the 2019 CFP title in January 2020. The biggest problem is there is no precedent for all the upheaval that has been wrought on college sports since then. No blueprint. No plan. Hopefully everyone won’t wake up in 20 years and say, “What have we done?”

Meanwhile, there are meetings, talk and little action. My fear is it will lead to hasty decisions with long-term consequences.

The plane is flying and no one is sure where, or even how, to land it.