College Football has been an absolutely wild ride this year. Teams like North Carolina took the nation by storm during the regular season, but still fell short when it counted the most. There were the usual powerhouses in the SEC to start the season, but by week 8 it was fairly clear that Alabama would be crowned as the king of the conference. With the National Championship looming, what have we learned from this season?

We learned that the Big 10 is back and in a spectacular way. The conference as a whole sent 10 out of 14 total teams to the bowls this year and also set numerous records as a conference during the regular season. Leonard Fournette and the LSU Tigers took over the SEC for the first two months of the season, but a tragic 3 losses in a row left them out of playoffs and conference championship contention, wondering if Les Miles is still their guy. Fournette was the premier back for the first two months of the regular season, but he sort of fell off during the Alabama game and really did not hit his stride until the Texas A&M game on November 29th. However, the bigger story is whether or not Les Miles will keep his job into next season.

Fournette pictured on top and Coach Miles below

Two coaching legends left us this year: Steve Spurrier of South Carolina and Frank Beamer of Virginia Tech. Coach Spurrier revolutionized the college game by implementing the pro-style passing attack of the 1990's Florida Gators. He and Danny Wuerffel led the nation in yards per play during the 1996 run to the national title. Frank Beamer was more of a defensive minded coach and coined the term "Beamer-Ball," where the defense would sometimes score more points than the offense in any given game. His 28 years at Tech is a career that we will all remember for a long time to come.

Spurrier top, Beamer below

Out west we learned about a little guy named Christian McCaffery. At 6'1" and only 201 lbs, he is not your typical running back, but he also is nowhere near your typical wide receiver. He led the nation this season with 3,864 total yards, which is a record in and of itself. His speed and agility proved to be too much for whatever opponent Stanford faced this season. He won the AP national player of the year, but fell short during Heisman voting to Derrick Henry of Alabama

All in all, this was phenomenal year for college football and I was very happy with the way that everything turned out. Now it's time to go into hibernation until the first games of the new year on September 1st, when South Carolina faces Vanderbilt to kick off the 2016-2017 season.