by Christine Brennan , USA TODAY

The BCS people are telling us, once again, that they have gathered the top two college football teams in the nation, Florida and Oklahoma, both 12-1, to play tonight at Dolphin Stadium for the national championship of college football.

They might be right about finding the two best teams.

But they also might be wrong.

It's entirely possible that the two teams that should be playing for the national championship are undefeated Utah and 12-1 Southern California. Or, 12-1 Texas and Southern California. Or Utah and Oklahoma. Or Florida and Texas.

You get the idea.

We have no idea.

"This is a national championship game, not the national championship game," independent BCS analyst Jerry Palm said Wednesday. "Unless you have a situation like a few years ago with Southern Cal and Texas, when No. 1 and No. 2 are dominating, you'll have a situation like this where we can't be sure."

If only the men who run the BCS would be so honest. If only they would utter a few words of uncertainty, admitting they're not sure they have it right, either. If only they would acknowledge the existence of other opinions -- and even encourage them to be aired when the 61 coaches who vote in the final USA TODAY Coaches' Poll make their selections after tonight's game.

Instead, taking itself too seriously, the BCS soldiers on as if there are only two college football teams left on earth, seemingly oblivious to the cacophony of dissent that is building around it.

Discordant notes are being sounded from the two most logical places, Utah and Texas. The coaches of those two programs -- Kyle Whittingham and Mack Brown -- have said they plan to place their respective teams No. 1 on their ballots after the Florida-Oklahoma game. (USC's Pete Carroll doesn't vote in the poll.)

The official reaction to this Utah-Texas coup?

"That's not what the system is and what we agreed to," American Football Coaches Association executive director Grant Teaff told USA TODAY. "This poll is not, since 1998, to select the national champion. The winner of the (BCS) game is the winner of the (BCS) trophy. Which means the coaches do not vote for No. 1, they vote for No. 2 down."

It's like those old Soviet elections, only worse.

No matter what anyone says, this newspaper will do what any independent organization should and simply tabulate the votes. Here's hoping many more coaches follow the lead of Whittingham and Brown and throw their support to Utah, Texas or USC. A fractured vote in the coaches' poll -- not to mention the chaos that might ensue in the unaffiliated Associated Press poll -- will provide future sports historians with the most accurate and realistic snapshot of the great uncertainty of the 2008 college football season. Florida's Urban Meyer, for one, gets it, saying he "absolutely" understands how Whittingham feels.

In many ways, this is like the old, anarchistic days of the 1970s in college football, when up to a handful of teams regularly engaged in delightful screaming matches over who was No. 1. The difference is, back then, no official group was trying to tell us it knew who the national champion was.

Now, we still have absolutely no idea, but the BCS is trying to convince us it does.

Palm has a suggestion for this crazy season. He would like the AP poll voters to get together and declare Utah, Texas and USC national tri-champions. With the winner of the Florida-Oklahoma game finishing atop the coaches' poll, there would then be four schools claiming the mythical national title.

"It would be perfect," Palm said. "Everybody gets to go home happy. Like youth soccer."

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