Here Are The 15 College Football Games Fans Won’t Forget From This Season

We did it. We finally made it. The regular season is behind us, and conference championships are right in front of us. It’s easy to move on, to focus on the glitter and shininess of the coaching silly season and the Playoff. But we haven’t even put the regular season in the ground yet. It deserves a bit of reflection.

Of the 128 FBS football teams, all but 32 are sitting at home these next two weeks. A bunch of those remaining teams will get the chance to play in a bowl game, so their season isn’t entirely over. That’s the honeymoon after the wedding, though. It’s fun. It’s great. And it’s well deserved. But it isn’t what we should be focused on. The journey matters. And it’s important to take a little time to look back on that journey for everyone.

This isn’t quite enough. I know that. It’s just a taste. I implore you to go back through and make your own list of moments you loved from this year’s season. Before we know it, we will be looking ahead to next year, and leaving this season behind. I’m going to want a souvenir, even if it’s just a silly little list.

Here were my 15 favorite games of the 2015 regular season.

Sept. 12 – Notre Dame 34, Virginia 27

One image defined this game, got a segment on ESPN, and got its very own Grantland article written about it.

We all just decided to photoshop it instead.

https://twitter.com/martinrickman/status/642838710623539201

I have no regrets about what happened. The fan’s name is Mike Bunting. And he’s kind of Internet famous now. A lot of people are. They’re good people. Nothing anyone did was malicious at all. Memes happen, for better or worse.

But it’s important to remember *how* this one happened. And it was a really good football game to get to that point. Virginia gave Notre Dame everything it could handle, and had a 27-26 lead with under two minutes remaining. But the Irish responded, and backup quarterback DeShone Kizer (in for Malik Zaire) threw a bomb to Will Fuller. That’s when Bunting collapsed and the screengrabs and photoshops began.

For a Week 2 game, it was really special.

Sept. 12 – Oklahoma 31, Tennessee 24 (2OT)

Looking back on it now, we should have seen Baker Mayfield’s special season coming. Not that many people have Heisman Moments in September, but had Mayfield not found that little bit of [whatever you call that thing that special quarterbacks have a way of manufacturing] in the fourth quarter and in overtime, the Sooners aren’t in the Playoff discussion right now. These games shape the rest of the season, but as more and more games get piled on top of them, we tend to let the memory (and importance) fade even though each of the early data points are just as valuable as the more recent ones. We really shouldn’t do that.

Oklahoma trailed by 17, and Mayfield started – well – poorly. He then went 11 for his next 14. His throw to Sterling Shepard pushed it to overtime. He had a scramble for a score in the first overtime. And another pass to Shepard in the second overtime was the game winner (sealed by an interception on the Sooners’ defensive possession).

“It’s one of the more special wins, maybe my favorite of all of them,” Bob Stoops said after the game. “A little Sooner magic came back out.”

Mayfield had a lot more Sooner magic to play with the rest of the season. We maybe just didn’t know it at the time.

Sept. 19 – Ole Miss 43, Alabama 37

With the way Alabama has played the second half of the season, it’s kind of insane to think they could lose to anyone in the SEC. It happened though! We all saw it with our own eyes. And Ole Miss exploited a formula that not that many teams can really execute – make a ton of big plays, and force a whole lot of turnovers. So good luck, everyone else.

What’s crazy to think about is Bama almost – almost – came back anyway.

The most memorable play of the game came in something that takes a bunch of words to describe and even those words aren’t good enough, so maybe a Vine is better.

This game also took like 5 hours.

Sept. 26 – TCU 55, Texas Tech 52

My dog had a seizure during this game and I ended up having to take her to the animal hospital emergency room, but right before I left Aaron Green had done the unthinkable and kept TCU’s hopes of an undefeated season alive.

The Horned Frogs did that week in and week out until injuries finally caught up to them. This game was insane, though, and I wish I had been able to pay more attention to it live at the time.

Oct. 18 – Michigan State 27, Michigan 23

There was just a sense that this game would go down to the final play. The problem? No one really could have predicted exactly what that final play would end up being. The entire Big Ten East would’ve been different had Michigan gotten that punt off. Instead the Spartans are in Indianapolis with a potential Playoff berth on the line. All because of one of the most ridiculous finishes we’ve ever seen.

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College football is great.

Oct. 25 – Georgia Tech 22, Florida State 16

Just when we thought things couldn’t get any more crazy after that Michigan State win, Georgia Tech had to go and try to one up the Spartans on their own. I was on the sideline for this one right at eye level. Something didn’t feel right even though Florida State was kicking a field goal with one of the nation’s best kickers to try and win the game. The Seminoles had this game well in hand pretty much the whole time, dominating on both sides of the ball. But they settled for field goals and kept getting procedural penalties on offense, and Georgia Tech converted a long fourth down that would set up the eventual tying score before Florida State even got its shot to win.

Another procedural penalty and the ‘Noles were kicking from further away than they wanted to – Aguayo lined up and didn’t get the lift he normally gets on the ball, and the Yellow Jackets blocked it. For a second, everyone kind of looked around. Was the ball live? Was regulation over? Were we heading to overtime? Then things moved in double speed. Georgia Tech had the ball and was running down the sideline. When I say Georgia Tech I mean the entire team. Everyone.

When it was all over, the Jackets had the win and people started flooding the field. Everyone just stood around not knowing what to do, cheering and hugging each other, and finally about 15 minutes later they showed the replay on the video board for the first time. People went nuts and cheered it like it was live all over again.

Oct. 29 – Oregon 61, Arizona State 55 (3OT)

The Ducks didn’t seem like the Ducks through a good portion of the 2015 season. It just didn’t seem right. This game changed all that, and Oregon became Oregon again. There were 177 plays in this game, and Oregon made the two that mattered most – the Ducks got a score in the third overtime with Bralon Addison getting his foot down, and Arrion Springs picked off Mike Bercovici.

Since that game Oregon hasn’t lost and beat Stanford and USC in the process. The turnaround didn’t happen early enough for the Ducks to win the Pac-12 North (the Cardinal still locked that up), but it made this season a lot more palatable for Oregon fans. A 10-win season is still in reach.

Oct. 31 – Miami 30, Duke 27

The play that got some officials suspended and ended up becoming a shirt is insane even on repeat viewings.

It shouldn’t have counted. There were a few things the refs screwed up on this one. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t completely amazing and fun as heck.

Nov. 8 – Clemson 23, Florida State 13

Clemson got revenge for that stomping the Tigers had to endure the last time Florida State was in Death Valley. And Clemson played up to its No. 1 ranking, won the ACC Atlantic in the process and kept its Playoff aspirations right in front of it. This was impressive to see, and the scene in the town was even more surreal.

Here’s a little bit of what I wrote following the game:

One garnet and gold FSU polo and visor clad individual is taking it all in stride, and is holding a mostly-empty handle of Fireball. There’s no telling whether the progress on the bottle was an individual or a group effort. He congratulates each passing Clemson fan on a good game. At one point, he stops and looks down before meeting someone’s eye. There’s a noticeable smirk on his face.

“Now go win it all,” he says.

Clemson is now three wins away from making that FSU fan happy.

Nov. 8 – Arkansas 53, Ole Miss 52 (OT)

I don’t know if this is what the Razorbacks are trying to do, but they managed to play in some of the most entertaining games all season long, win or lose. This one they came out on top thanks in large part to a converted 4th-and-25 that you had to see to believe.

Oh yeah and then they went for two and won outright. Way to go, BERT.

Nov. 15 – Houston 35, Memphis 34

Sometimes a season just is meant to be special. Houston was trailing by 20 points and was missing its Heisman candidate quarterback, Greg Ward Jr. It didn’t matter. Kyle Postma came in the game and dazzled, engineering a comeback that saw a go-ahead score and a missed field goal by Memphis at the very end to keep the Cougars perfect at the time. (They’d lose to UConn the next week before beating Navy to clinch their side of the division and earn a trip to the AAC Championship game.)

Tom Herman learned a lot from Urban Meyer in his time as offensive coordinator with the Buckeyes, and no game was it more evident than this one. His team stayed calm, took a modified approach to the E+R=O formula that worked so well for Ohio State last season and came away with a win.

Nov. 22 – Michigan State 17, Ohio State 14

Two reasons:

Nov. 22 – UNC 30, Virginia Tech 27

In Frank Beamer’s last home game at Virginia Tech, his team almost did it. The Hokies came back from two scores down in the fourth quarter to tie it up and force overtime, but the Tar Heels pulled out the win – and kept their special season going. It was one of those “you had to be there” moments to really understand how much energy was in that town on this Saturday, but it’s something every person who was there will never forget.

Nov. 22 – LSU 19, Texas A&M 7

In a vacuum, a 19-7 game where nobody was really playing for anything significant in the post season the last week of the season wouldn’t make it. But it’s about the scene afterward that mattered here. Les Miles being carried off by his players, the ovation he got, his quotes in postgame. It was all amazing.

And LSU admins weren’t exactly thrilled that Les showed them up when they were this close to firing him.

https://twitter.com/JohnPhillips/status/670823933965377536

Sometimes the story writes itself and you just have to stay out of the way.

Nov. 22 – Stanford 38, Notre Dame 36

This felt like one of those heavyweight fights where both fighters just collapse in a heap at the end. Notre Dame would punch and Stanford would punch back. Over and over and over again. Notre Dame took the lead, and people flipped out on David Shaw holding onto his timeouts. Stanford ended up driving down the field and used up every second they possibly could, kicking a game-winning field goal to cap off a terrific game and really give us the finale of the regular season we deserved.

Honorable mentions: Texas beating Oklahoma in the Red River, Memphis beating Ole Miss, Temple almost beating Notre Dame, that rainy and wet Notre Dame-Clemson game, the 4OT Duke-Virginia Tech game, Nebraska’s controversial last second win over Michigan State, Oklahoma-TCU,  Mississippi State-Arkansas, Ohio ending Northern Illinois long, long November winning streak.