7 College Football Things We're Thankful for in 2015
The biggest college football weekend of the season coincides with one of our biggest holidays, and fans and followers of this sport definitely have a lot to be thankful for this time of year.
Sure, college football is far from perfect and can sometimes get quite ugly, but there are plenty of great things that we love and that keep us coming back every single season. It's what brings our families—our real ones and our football ones—together.
And this 2015 season, one filled with chaos, contenders and Cinderella stories, has given us much to be thankful for as fans.
It doesn't matter if your team is competing for a championship, looking to lock down a big-time bowl game or is already out of contention this season. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, these following slides contain seven things about college football that most fans should appreciate, regardless of school affiliations.
Of course, we all have our own specific reasons for thankfulness that go beyond the general ones I've listed here. Tell us what you're thankful for this college football season in the comments below, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Rivalry Week
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Let's kick off this list with the one thing that is on almost every college football fan's mind this week—rivalry week.
The next few days will feature many of the biggest regular-season games for the entire sport. Some have championship implications, others have nothing but bragging rights on the line. Some rivalry games have unique trophies. Others have nicknames that have become synonymous with the schools participating in them.
Consider the fact that on Saturday alone, The Game, Clean Old-Fashioned Hate, the Palmetto Bowl, the Iron Bowl, the UCLA-USC game, the Egg Bowl, the Florida-Florida State game, the Notre Dame-Stanford game and Bedlam will be played. Friday features the Civil War, the Apple Cup and the "Revivalry."
"The first thing one does when he picks a college football team, before butchering the words of the fight song the first few times through, is learn who to hate," Bleacher Report's Adam Kramer wrote. "It’s on Page 1 of the manual ... Oh, Rivalry Week is indeed special."
After the traditional Thanksgiving feast, college football offers us an all-you-can-eat buffet of intense, pressure-packed matchups that have an effect on fans for the next 364 days of the year. It doesn't get much better than that.
Tailgating
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While we're on the subject of feasting, let's briefly pause and realize that rivalry week is one of the last times college football fans will get to enjoy traditional tailgating before next season.
Tailgating is one of the many aspects that makes college football unique from any other sport on the planet. Sure, other sports may have some fans who hang out and eat in parking lots before games, but they don't do it quite to the same level as you find in college football.
What other sport has venues such as The Grove at Ole Miss, the endless sea of RVs like the one at Penn State or the Vol Navy at Tennessee? The variety of cuisines, locales and traditions that go along with college football tailgating all across the country is quite impressive to behold.
Fans from schools big or small can be just as passionate about tailgating as they are about their football teams. My attempt at ranking the 25 best tailgating schools in the country from back in May remains one of the most-read and most-commented articles here at B/R.
So if you're fortunate enough to be on campus or at the stadium for this last weekend of the regular season, appreciate one of the year's final opportunities to tailgate. It'll be a long time before it returns.
Unbelievable Endings
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College football seems to get more than its fair share of unbelievable endings to games, and this 2015 season has featured several "once-in-a-lifetime" moments.
Keep in mind that the...
- Fumbled punt recovery and touchdown for Michigan State on the last play of the game against rival Michigan
- Blocked field-goal touchdown for Georgia Tech as time expired against defending ACC champion Florida State
- Eight-lateral and illegal last-second kick-return touchdown for Miami against Duke
...all happened on three consecutive weeks this season. Three extremely rare and completely wild plays that ended games came right in a row.
In addition to those incredible moments, college football has also had several Hail Marys, clutch field goals, last-second denials, wild last-minute touchdowns and whatever this was in Arkansas-Ole Miss to finish games in 2015. It has truly been the year of chaos.
And with the stakes getting higher each week as we inch closer to the postseason, there's a good chance we'll add several more incredible finishes to the list during rivalry week and conference championship week. What a time to be alive, indeed.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
The Golden Era of Coaching
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A couple of weeks ago, Bleacher Report's Bryan Fischer proclaimed that college football was in a golden era of coaching due to the overwhelming success of Ohio State's Urban Meyer and Alabama's Nick Saban.
"Despite the lack of end-game management by other coaches and a host of issues stemming from bad management in the sport ... we really are in a golden age of coaches, thanks mostly to the two guys at the top," Fischer wrote.
And although Meyer's team is coming off a rough loss that will most likely keep it from competing for the national title this season, it's hard to argue with the talk of the golden era.
Saban has another championship-caliber team on his hands in Tuscaloosa. Bob Stoops is a win away from contending for a title again at Oklahoma. Jim Harbaugh came back to the college game this year, and he has turned around his alma mater of Michigan in a heartbeat. Dabo Swinney is leading the nation's No. 1 team at Clemson after a streak of double-digit-win seasons.
From coast to coast, there are plenty of excellent head coaches, including those who are set to shake up what will be a wild offseason on the coaching carousel. The game may have lost some of its elder statesmen to retirement and resignation this year, but fans everywhere should sit back and appreciate the large number of quality head coaches this sport has at the moment.
The Year of the Running Back
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College football's award landscape has been dominated by quarterbacks the last several seasons. But this year, the game is going through a running back renaissance, and it's been a delight to watch a larger-than-normal number of superstar rushers.
Of the nine biggest betting favorites for the Heisman Trophy right now, according to Odds Shark, five of them are running backs—Alabama's Derrick Henry, Ohio State's Ezekiel Elliott, LSU's Leonard Fournette, Stanford's Christian McCaffrey and Florida State's Dalvin Cook.
"The Year of the Running Back" is so obvious that there was actually some real controversy Tuesday when Elliott and Cook weren't named finalists for the Doak Walker Award. When was the last time you can remember there being heated arguments about the finalists for the Doak Walker Award? I'll hang up and listen.
Of course, this parade of top-quality running backs isn't complete without a few more notable names, including Oregon's Royce Freeman and Baylor's Shock Linwood. Others from the Group of Five are putting up ridiculous seasons, such as New Mexico State's Larry Rose III, Georgia Southern's Matt Breida and San Jose State's Tyler Ervin.
That's not to say there hasn't been exceptional quarterback play this season. But as a fan of eye-popping offensive statistics, I'm personally thankful for 2015 being the Year of the Running Back again in college football.
Biggest Bowl Season Ever
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There will be a record 40 bowl games this year—excluding the national championship game—meaning 80 different teams will get to experience postseason football in the next couple of months.
According to Ralph D. Russo of the Associated Press, 71 teams have already become bowl eligible with six wins on the season. If nine more don't emerge across the next two weekends, the NCAA might have to allow some 5-7 teams into the postseason, which drew the ire of Jon Solomon of CBS Sports this week:
"The absurdity of 5-7 teams possibly in bowls. Yes, I know some people will watch. It's still absurd."
Sure, the addition of several new bowls in the last few years has opened the door for teams with losing records to possibly play in the postseason. But count me in the crowd that wants to see as many bowls as possible. The new bowls were designed to prevent .500 teams from staying at home, which is what happened to five teams last season.
What some may call "too much" football is infinitely better than no football. While putting five-win teams in these slots is not ideal, let's count it as more games that we have the ability to watch before college football goes away for several long months and leaves us to scavenge for the tiniest scraps of offseason news.
The College Football Playoff
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Last year, the playoff didn't eliminate the controversy we saw from the BCS—looking at you, Baylor and TCU.
And it has already caused a lot of knockdown, drag-out arguments this year—now I'm looking at you, Oklahoma and Notre Dame.
But fans everywhere should be grateful for the College Football Playoff. It's not perfect by any means, and there is already loud clamoring for it to be expanded to eight teams, but the playoff has already shown to be an exciting, successful and better way to determine a national champion.
By paving the way for additional teams to compete for the national championship, the playoff has already dramatically changed how we view the regular season, out-of-conference scheduling and the balance of power among conferences. One loss doesn't completely knock a team out of contention for the national title anymore.
College football wanted and perhaps needed a playoff, and now we live in a world where four of the best teams in the country get to battle it out for the title instead of two from a computer formula. The sport still has a lot of things to fix, but one of its latest changes is perhaps its best so far.
Justin Ferguson is a college football writer at Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @JFergusonBR.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
