College football historians know that dozens of entities have awarded national championships over the decades, so many that there have been almost no "consensus" champions at all. In fact, between the BCS, AP, UPI, CFRA, FWAA, HAF, INS, NCF, NFF, QPRS, FACT, USA Today, Sporting News, Anderson & Hester, Richard Billingsley, the Boand System, Congrove, the Colley Matrix, Casper Whitney, DeVold, Dickinson, Dunkel, the Eck Rating System, Houlgate, Litkenhous, Kenneth Massey, the Matthews Grid, the New York Times, Jeff Sagarin, Peter Wolfe and the Williamson System, the NCAA only listed a dozen unanimous champions between 1900 and 2006, when it stopped counting. And the last one (Southern Cal) in 2004, when undefeated Auburn took the liberty of awarding itself rings that said "national champions." The idea is kind of a farce, as Utah coach Kyle Whittingham recognized when his undefeated team was shut out by voters last month:

"National champions is really a relative term. It's an opinion. Until there's a playoff system that's all it's going to be," Whittingham said in a teleconference Friday morning. "So we're really not caught up in that at this point and time."

"It's all opinion," he added, "and there's really no true champion with the system that is in place."

Yes, literally anyone can name a "national champion," and to prove it, fellow blog College Football Talk is sending a man to Salt Lake City Thursday to bestow upon Whittingham and the Utes their rightful crown:

... instead of following our usual approach of whining and complaining and ultimately doing nothing about a perceived injustice, we’ve decided to take action.

On Thursday at 2:00 p.m. local time, site co-owner Larry Mazza will present the CFT 2008 National Championship Trophy to Coach Whittingham and the rest of the team at the Dee Glen Smith Center on the campus of the University of Utah.

No, we ain’t kidding. And it’s a real trophy that cost real money — not some retrofitted bowling trophy from 1975.

Whittingham accepted the offer, and we cleared it all through the NCAA.

Mazza flies out today.

I used to toy with the idea of officially naming a champion and sending off some kind of certificate to the lucky school -- literally, "The Hinton National Championship" -- when I was a kid. Now that there's a precedent (and I can actually afford a plane ticket to the campus) I'm committed to doing this next year, right before I run that marathon. Does anyone know how much a decent trophy costs?