FanHouse Kyle Whittingham

FORT WORTH, Texas -- Gary Patterson really doesn't want to lobby the BCS for inclusion into its national championship mix.

The fourth-ranked TCU Horned Frogs' impressive body of work should be enough.

They are just one of six remaining undefeated teams in the country, and have collected quality road wins at Clemson, Air Force and BYU en route to moving into fourth place in the BCS standings, the highest such ranking ever for a non-automatic qualifier.

The final Associated Press college football poll is out, and Florida, of course, is No. 1. But a quarter of the AP voters picked Utah as the No. 1 team in the country, and the Utes finished the season No. 2.

Overall, Florida got 48 first-place votes, Utah got 16 and USC got one. At least one AP voter picked both Utah and USC ahead of Florida.

Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said he was disappointed his team wasn't crowned the national champion:

"I thought we had an outside chance," Whittingham told the AP. "There was enough national sentiment, I thought we might get the No. 1 slot. It wasn't to be. ... All you can do is go out and beat the people on the schedule, which was exactly what our guys did."

Whittingham is right, of course, that all you can do is what his guys did. But this is college football, where the Utahs of the world aren't allowed to compete for the national championship. Utah did everything it could do, and was rewarded with the highest honor Utah could possibly receive in college football: No. 2.

The winner of Thursday's Oklahoma-Florida game is supposed to be the automatic and unanimous winner of the national championship, as determined by the USA Today coaches' poll. But that might not happen this year.

Texas coach Mack Brown said after beating Ohio State last night that he's voting the Longhorns No. 1, and Utah coach Kyle Whittingham says he'll vote the Utes No. 1. USC coach Pete Carroll has also said he believes his team is the best, although Carroll doesn't have a vote in the coaches' poll.

But while Brown and Whittingham have said they're voting their teams No. 1, it's not clear that they'll be able to. As noted by CFT, the structure of the coaches' poll is such that they're really only counting votes for the teams ranked 2-25. So if Whittingham votes Utah No. 1, his ballot will most likely be tabulated as if he had voted the Oklahoma-Florida winner No. 1 and Utah No. 2.

The bottom line is that when the coaches agreed to this process, they agreed to disenfranchise themselves. If these coaches want to vote for whoever they like, they should have thought of that before agreeing to be a part of this flawed process.

By whipping Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, Utah has finished the season as college football's only undefeated team, and made a case that it deserves to be considered the No. 1 team in the country.

Asked whether his players should be called the national champions, Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said this:

"Somebody has to explain to me why they wouldn't. There is only one undefeated team in the United States of America right now in Division I football, and it's these guys right there.

"All you can do is go out and beat the people that are on your schedule, beat the people you play against, take care of business and do what you can do and that's about all you can do. All the other things are beyond your control."

The Utes won't win either of the two generally recognized national championships, of course. The BCS national title will go to the Oklahoma-Florida winner, and the majority of the AP voters will choose the winner of that game as the AP national champion as well.