PHOTO: Texas A&M claims new national, conference titles on Kyle Field display

Are the Aggies a little insecure about their standing in their new conference digs? They've added two new pre-Associated Press national championships and two conference titles from their Big 12 days -- ones they didn't win in the Big 12 title game -- to their Kyle Field display.

Via RantSports.com, here's a current photo of a display outside Texas A&M's Kyle Field:

You'll notice it honors three Aggie national championships and three A&M conference championships from the program's 17-year run in the Big 12 -- 1997, 1998, and 2010.

But if you look at this other RantSports photo of the display as it appeared last year, you'll also notice that it celebrated only the 1939 national championship and didn't honor the 1997 or 2010 Big 12 championship seasons. 

There's a perfectly good reason for that, of course -- the Aggies didn't win the Big 12 championship those seasons. In 1997 A&M won the Big 12 South division but was annihilated by Nebraska 54-15 in the league championship game. In 2010 (as you may remember, it only happened two seasons ago and all), the Aggies didn't even make it that far -- they finished in a three-way tie with Oklahoma and Oklahoma State for the South division title but finished third via the league's overall record tiebreaker.

As for the newly-added national titles in 1919 and 1927, it's just more of the wobbly retroactive bookkeeping made famous by Alabama (and, to a less-famous but no less wobbly extent, Pitt). 

So at least the Aggies have company when it comes to claiming titles like 1919's and 1927's, and if hanging up dates of shared Big 12 divisional titles alongside all their old Southwest Conference crowns seems insane, well, at least the Big 12 media guide backs them up for some reason.

The bigger question is why now? Those 1919 and 1927 "championships" have been out there forever. The Aggies could have put up the Big 12 conference titles the day after the season ended, if they wanted the bar that low? Why this offseason?

The only logical answer is because they're entering the SEC. Florida's coming to Kyle Field this Saturday, in fact, with Mike Slive in tow to toss the coin. Apparently, someone at Texas A&M wants its visitors as impressed as possible, and hey, here's an easy way to make that display that much more impressive -- even if equating a shared divisional title with an actual conference championship makes no sense, even if they've (rightly) avoided descending into the retroactive title quagmire for decades.

In short: if we didn't know better, we might say the Aggies were feeling a little insecure about keeping up appearances with their new SEC neighbors. 

HT: USA Today.