Texas A&M will play its first Southeastern Conference football game Saturday, and to honor the occasion the school has given itself two more national championships.

The Aggies appropriately claimed the national title for 1939, when they went 11-0 and finished No. 1 in most of the polls. That championship, in addition to conference titles, long has been acknowledged outside Kyle Field.

But the display has been changed this offseason.

National championships were added for the 1919 and 1927 seasons.

The circumstances of those championships are certainly open for debate.

In 1919, Harvard and Illinois were regarded as the national champions among the various rankings. However, the Aggies, who finished 10-0 that season, are making their claim based on the National Championship Foundation, which was formed in 1980 and voted on past champions. The group awarded A&M a share of the title in a three-way tie with Notre Dame and Harvard.

Seem silly? The same National Championship Foundation awarded four schools a national title in 1993 and five schools in 1991.

In 1927, the Aggies went 8-0-1, and Notre Dame and Pittsburgh were regarded as splitting the national championship. However, the Aggies were retroactively crowned No. 1 by a mathematical ranking system developed in 1935 that ran the results from the 1929 season.

Claiming a title before the emergence of the AP poll in 1936 and the coaches poll in 1950 has become a cottage industry. There are numerous cases of schools "winning" a title based on retroactive voting or some mathematical formula developed long after the games were played.

That creates confusion among what is believed by schools and what is regarding by historians of college football.

For example, Alabama has won nine national titles since 1961 by either finishing first in one of the polls or winning the BCS title game. However, the school also is claiming five championships prior to that time. In one of those years, 1941, Alabama finished the regular season 8-2 and No. 20 in the AP poll before beating Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl.

Makes you wonder if in 100 years all the results from the BCS will be wiped from the database.

Someone in the future could devise a formula to select and replay the games under the upcoming four-team playoff format that goes into effect in 2014.