Written by Matt Zemek at The Comeback
The college football regular season — save Army-Navy — is over.
It is time to honor the year’s best, and few topics are more paramount at this point on the calendar than the best coach over the past three months.
Saturday, the Big Ten and ACC Championship Games matched the four best power-conference coaches in the country. (Brian Kelly of Notre Dame doesn’t coach in a conference, and Tom Herman of Houston coaches in the Group of Five.)
Nick Saban, David Shaw, Bob Stoops, Jim McElwain, Jimbo Fisher, Gary Patterson, Mike Gundy, and Jim Harbaugh all did extremely well, but four men exceeded them from the power conferences. (In the Group of Five, Rocky Long of San Diego State, Jeff Brohm of Western Kentucky, Dino Babers of Bowling Green — now at Syracuse — Todd Monken of Southern Mississippi, and Blake Anderson of Arkansas State all flourished.)
Entering Saturday, fans and pundits were left to wonder:
Just exactly how did Kirk Ferentz guide Iowa to a 12-0 record?
Just exactly how did Mark Dantonio enable Michigan State to survive all its key injuries — including Connor Cook at Ohio State against the big, bad Buckeyes — and win a division championship?
Just exactly how did Larry Fedora engineer such a dramatic turnaround at North Carolina, giving the Tar Heels an outside shot at the College Football Playoff in the event of pure chaos on Saturday (which obviously did not emerge)?
All three men stood at the top of their profession this season. Had Iowa defeated Michigan State, it would have been very hard to deny Ferentz his moment in the sun, especially after the tedium and frustration of the previous several seasons in Iowa City. Clemson had been a national player the previous few college football seasons, but not Iowa. Ferentz, at 13-0, would have owned the most unassailable argument of them all.
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