Hi there,
In the past there were some commands for creating network ifgrps/vlans that required the ports to be physically "up", so in similar situations I would plug the ports into the other controller's equivalent ports so they would come "up", and then switch them over to the network later.
The biggest time saver though, assuming you are deploying 9.3, will be to connect the disk shelves and begin zeroing the system and creating aggregates while the network is offline.
Good luck!