Missouri is going to stand its 1960 team up in front of a full house on Sept. 19 and call them national champions, and the Missouri 1960 national championship argument, dusty as it is, deserves the hearing. The school made it official weeks after a sitting U.S. senator from Missouri introduced a measure recognizing the Tigers' claim to that title. Congress does not vote on trophies. Schools decide what to hang. But the timing tells you somebody in Columbia had been waiting a long while for the excuse.

Here is what that team actually did. Dan Devine's Tigers rolled through the fall unbeaten and untied into November, sitting at the top of the polls, and then lost at Kansas. That was supposed to be the end of it. Kansas later forfeited the game for using an ineligible player, which flipped a 9-1 season into a 10-0 one on paper if not in anybody's memory of the afternoon. Then Missouri went to Miami and beat a Navy team quarterbacked around Joe Bellino, the Heisman winner that year, 21-14 in the Orange Bowl. Beat the Heisman guy on New Year's. Went home 10-0.

And got nothing.

The wire services closed their books before the bowls in that era, which is the whole ballgame here. Minnesota was voted national champion in December and then lost the Rose Bowl to Washington, and nobody had a mechanism to take it back. Missouri finished the season with the trophy already spoken for. Checked the almanac on this one: that pre-bowl poll quirk is responsible for more retroactive claims than any single rule college football ever wrote, and it took the sport another 38 years to build a system that settled it on the field.

What comes next is a ceremony and a banner, not a rewrite. Other programs have their own paperwork for 1960 and will keep it. Nobody is losing anything. What Missouri is really doing is putting names and faces in front of a crowd that has only ever heard the story secondhand, and those men are in their eighties now. That is the part worth caring about. There is no committee vote that fixes 66 years of being the answer to a trivia question.

I'll be watching the Sept. 19 ceremony for the roll call, and for how many of them make it back to Columbia to hear it out loud.