The 2015 SEC season was full of great plays, great players and great stories.

We picked the 10 best:

1. Head Ball Coach resigns: Steve Spurrier made a point of saying he didn’t retire. He resigned Oct. 12, just days after South Carolina fell to 2-4. Spurrier (228-89-2) rebuilt South Carolina’s football program after winning a national championship at Florida. Only Bear Bryant won more games as an SEC coach than Spurrier (208), and no coach in Florida or South Carolina did.

 “I’ll just be the former Head Ball Coach now,” he said at his going-away announcement.
2. Coaching carousel: Spurrier’s departure was as sudden, dramatic and surprising as Mark Richt’s final days in Georgia were drawn out. After weeks of speculation, the Bulldogs fired their head coach of 15 years. Richt is 141-51 at Georgia and will coach the Bulldogs in their bowl game, something he has done each season in Athens.
SEC coaches are always on the hot seat, and Les Miles’ was on fire, right up until the third quarter of the Tigers’ home finale, if you believe their athletic director. After a week of letting Miles twist in the wind, Joe Alleva announced that Miles would return next season.
3. Missouri is a mess: Football record aside, racial tension on campus turned into a national story when football players threatened to boycott. The protests led to the resignation of the school system’s president Tim Wolfe and reassignment of its chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin.
Days later, football coach Gary Pinkel announced he was resigning to focus on his health. His decision capped the most tumultuous week in campus history.
4. Will Grier suspension: Nick Chubb’s knee injury changed Georgia’s season and ultimately played a role in Richt’s dismissal, but the Bulldogs were a flawed team without a true quarterback.
Grier’s suspension for PED use might have cost the Gators a chance at a national championship.
Yes, Florida still won the SEC East, but with Grier running the offense, the Gators were undefeated and had climbed into the top 10. Without him, the offense has sunk, and so too has its chance to upset Alabama in the SEC Championship Game.
5. Chasing Herschel: Leonard Fournette burst out of the gates and seemingly had the Heisman Trophy wrapped up by Oct. 3 after ripping off three consecutive 220-yard performances. His only competition seemed to be SEC legends Herschel Walker and Bo Jackson.
Then Fournette ran into Alabama. The Tide held him to 31 yards and allowed its star running back, Derrick Henry, to race past Fournette and into the Heisman lead. Henry finished with 210 yards, but he was just getting started.
Henry added 204 the next week against Mississippi State, then pummeled Auburn for 271 yards on an astonishing 46 carries.
With 1,797 yards and two games remaining, he’s all but certain to break Walker’s SEC single-season record of 1,891 yards.
6. QB or not QB? What a weird year. Three quarterbacks — Chad Kelly, Dak Prescott and Brandon Allen — can finish in the top 20 all-time on the SEC’s single-season passing yards list. Kelly (3,740) already is No. 8, and with a modest bowl game performance can become just the third SEC QB to reach 4,000.
Prescott (3,413) needs just 275 yards to move into the top 10.
The rest of the league? Injuries and suspensions impacted play at several schools and forced backups into starting roles they were ill-equipped to handle. But in other cases, the QB play simply regressed.
Patrick Towles played so poorly he lost his job and decided to transfer. Johnny McCrary took a step back and opened the door for freshman Kyle Shurmur. LSU’s Brandon Harris wasn’t ready. Auburn never could settle between Jeremy Johnson and Sean White. And on and on it went, a parade of incompletions and 100-yard passing games in what might have been the SEC’s poorest year of QB play.
7. Funny how the ball bounces: You can game-plan almost everything, and SEC coordinators do, but you can’t game-plan luck. And fate, as much as anything else, helped shape the top of the SEC West this year.
Ole Miss would have won its first division title since 1963 if not for the wildest play in the SEC this season: Arkansas’ 4th-and-25 catch-lateral-tip-recovery-run by Alex Collins, that helped the Razorbacks win in overtime.
So many things had to go right, and they all did for the Razorbacks, who joked afterward that they did practice it.
Of course, Ole Miss never would have been in position to win its first SEC title since 1963 had luck not smiled on the Rebels against Alabama.
Remember their fluke TD? High snap over Kelly’s head, he recovers it and as he’s getting drilled throws arguably the most ill-advised pass of the season. The pass looked like an infield popup, and Laquon Treadwell settled under it, along with two closing Alabama players. They hit Treadwell just as he touched the ball.
Ole Miss’ Quincy Adeboyjo caught the carom and took it 66 yards for a TD. Ole Miss won that game by a touchdown.
8. Alabama’s obit published prematurely: Fans and media couldn’t wait to bury the Tide after the Ole Miss loss. They dropped 10 spots to No. 12 in the AP Poll.
USA Today, Yahoo!, The Sporting News and CBSSports.com were among the national outlets making immediate funeral arrangements.

Alabama soon got back to its winning ways, but even that wasn’t enough. When the Tide debuted at No. 4 in the College Football Playoff Poll, Twitter nearly broke.

Turns out, the Tide just might.

9. McElwain jumpstarts Florida: The New Ball Coach worked wonders in Gainesville, managing his way past one self-induced blunder with his sideline tirade at Kelvin Taylor and then game-planning around Grier’s suspension.

McElwain is the favorite to win SEC Coach of the Year in his first season in the league. Just five coaches have done that in the past 25 seasons: Spurrier (Florida, 1990), Gerry DiNardo (Vanderbilt, 1991), Terry Bowden (Auburn, 1993), Kevin Sumlin (Texas A&M, 2012) and Gus Malzahn (Auburn, 2013).

10. Swings and misses: The media got plenty wrong, too. It picked Auburn to win the SEC. It picked Florida to finish ninth overall, fifth in the SEC East. At SDS? We weren’t quite quick enough to recognize Chad Kelly’s potential. We listed him 11th out of the 14 QBs coming out of spring practice. Two guys in the top four — Jeremy Johnson and Brice Ramsey — lost their starting jobs.

Wacky year, indeed.