Gentlemen, start your complaining.

The same goes for gentlewomen, gentlechildren, gentlecattle and every other life form in Texas. The BCS officially hosed the Longhorns on Sunday when it anointed Florida and Oklahoma as contestants in its championship game.

The reaction won’t be gentle in Texas, which has actually been grumbling for weeks. It knew what was coming, and Saturday’s conference championship games merely confirmed a couple of facts.

The Gators and Sooners deserve the trip to Miami.

The BCS deserves the trip to the Yucca Mountain Repository.

That’s where we send our nuclear waste, so it’s a fitting spot for BCS bozos to spend the next 25,000 years. But we don’t come here today to bury the radioactive BCS. As painful as it is, we come to praise a system that succeeded in its ultimate goal — matching the best two teams in a championship game.

Them’s fighting words in the Longhorn State. If you don’t believe it, check out any of the thousands of Web sites or chat rooms dedicated to today’s topic. But first be sure there are no kids in the room.

I’m not saying Texans don’t have a right to complain. It’s just that the principles of all fans change according to their team’s plight.

Yep, the Longhorns beat the Sooners. But if Texas had lost to Oklahoma but still gotten into the Big 12 title game, Oklahoma fans would be screaming that head-to-head results should be the ultimate deciding factor.

Mack Brown’s been busily making that case. Rumor is he even hired ACORN to register Harris Poll voters, which might explain how 429 writers named “Mickey Mouse” voted the Longhorns No. 1.

They said head-to-head results matter the most. If that’s the ultimate deciding factor, one-loss Texas Tech should have been ahead of one-loss Texas. Except, of course, that Oklahoma crushed Tech.

So maybe Penn State is the one getting hosed?

Round and round the debate goes. I suspect it won’t stop until an 0-17 team (probably Notre Dame) gets a bowl bid.

The BCS is all about protecting the spoils system of conferences, bowls and TV. Those lobbies are too entrenched and self-serving to risk a playoff.

The stench of injustice has gotten so bad that Football Fan-Elect Barack Obama has threatened to dispatch Hillary Clinton to mediate a settlement. That prompted the usual reaction that “Don’t presidents have more important things to do?”

Nothing is going to solve this year’s dilemma, so we are again reduced to a gripe-a-thon based on selected facts. The facts I select are these:

If not for a blocked extra point against Ole Miss, Florida would be 13-0 and getting compared to the ’85 Bears. That loss actually awakened a Tebow monster, and no team has played better in the past two months.

Unless it’s the Sooners. They have averaged 59.8 points in their seven games since Texas.

Oh yeah, that.

What makes the Longhorns inferior to Florida and Oklahoma? To quote Obama, that’s above my pay grade.

The only answer I have is it’s a matter of opinion. Mine is that the BCS got it right, and Florida vs. Oklahoma will be as good as it gets.

Just don’t tell anyone in Texas.