History
After twelve years, the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena, California, was still struggling to attract interest in 1901, and its organizers were thinking of moving it from New Years Day to Washington's Birthday.
James Wagner, a newcomer from the east, was elected president of the tournament in the fall of 1901. He suggested staging a post-season football game to draw more interest and spectators.
There were many skeptics who felt that the $3,500 guarantee to participating teams for expenses would simply run the annual festival even deeper into the hole. But when Fielding "Hurry Up" Yost, the coach of Michigan's undefeated team, issued a challenge to the University of California early in December, Wagner saw an opportunity. A Michigan-California matchup, he reasoned, would be a great draw in Pasadena.
California turned down the challenge, but Stanford - where Yost had coached in 1900 - stepped in as a substitute, and the match was made. A crowd of about 8,000 watched Michigan annihilate the California favorites, 49-0.
The game was very profitable. However, organizers were afraid that the lopsided result would discourage fans from returning in 1903, so they replaced football with chariot racing. After amateur drivers didn't work out because they kept colliding with one another, professionals were brought in to race the chariots. Then spectators began to suspect the races were fixed, so the committee decided to try football again.
The second Tournament of Roses game, as it was then called, took place in 1916, when Washington State beat Brown, 14-0.
Originally played in Pasadena's Tournament Park, the game moved into a big new stadium, the Rose Bowl, in 1923, when it was named for the stadium.
In 1933, Miami started a Palm Festival on New Years Day, with a post-season game between the University of Miami and Manhattan College as an attraction. To capitalize on the Rose Bowl's popularity, the game was renamed the Orange Bowl and the festival became the Orange Bowl Festival in 1935.
Also in 1935, the Sugar Bowl was inaugurated in New Orleans. Two more bowl games began in Texas in the next two years: El Paso's Sun Bowl in 1936 and the Cotton Bowl in Dallas in 1937.
Although they weren't called bowls, many other post-season games were played during the early 1930s to raise money for various charitable efforts that had been established to raise money for the growing number of unemployed.
The NCAA estimates that there were more than 100 such games, almost all of them one-shot affairs. One of them is worth noting, though, because it revived the Army-Navy football series.
The two service academies had stopped playing their annual game after the 1927 season. In 1930, they were persuaded to play a charity game in New York's Yankee Stadium. The game drew a large, enthusiastic crowd, and was repeated in 1931 before another large crowd.
Because of the success of the two charity games, Army and Navy resumed athletic relations in 1932 and began playing regular-season games once more. The series has continued ever since.
After World War II, a number of new bowl games sprang up, most of them rather short-lived. Among them were the Cigar Bowl in Tampa, the Camellia Bowl in Lafayette, Louisiana, the Delta Bowl in Memphis, the Dixie Bowl in Birmingham, the Great Lakes Bowl in Cleveland, the Harbor Bowl in San Diego, the Oil Bowl in Houston, the Raisin Bowl in Fresno, and the Salad Bowl (!) in Phoenix.
However, two post-season games founded in that period are still in existence, the Gator Bowl and the Florida Citrus Bowl (originally the Tangerine Bowl). A third, San Antonio's Alamo Bowl, was revived in 1993 after having been played just once before, in 1947.
Since the late 1950s, the prospect of money from television has lured many other bowl games into existence. Some went out of business after just a year or two, others lasted a decade or more, and a few of them have become fixtures of the holiday season.
More recently, television exposure for sponsoring companies has become as important as the money paid for television rights - and, in some cases, probably more important.
There was much adverse reaction when the Sugar Bowl USF&G Sugar Bowl in 1988. Since then, corporate sponsorship has become commonplace among major bowls. We now have the FedEx Orange Bowl, the Southwestern Bell Cotton Bowl (which was, for a time, the Mobil Cotton Bowl), and the Nokia Sugar Bowl, to name only the major games that have appended corporate names to the original names.
There are a couple of others which are known only by a corporate name. The Blockbuster Bowl, for example, was founded in 1990 to publicize the Blockbuster Video chain. Carquest Auto Parts then took over sponsorship and renamed it, of course, the Carquest Bowl. It's now the MicronPC.com Bowl.
To avoid programming conflicts, the "bowl season" has been greatly extended. The original bowls were all played on New Years Day. Now the first bowl game is played about a week before Christmas and the last is played early in January, but after New Years.
The Bowl Championship Series
The perennial cry for a true national college football championship has been taken by bowl organizers as both a threat and an opportunity. The threat is that a post-season tournament for Division I teams will rob the bowl games of their luster. The opportunity is that the major bowls themselves can work together to create at least a mythical championship game.
To seize the opportunity and deflect the threat, the Bowl Coalition was formed in 1992 by four major bowl games (the Cotton, Fiesta, Orange and Sugar), five major college conferences, and independent Notre Dame.
The goal of the coalition was to stage an annual championship game between the nation's two top-ranked teams, based on the Associated Press and USA Today/CNN polls. That brought about two "championship" matchups, with second-ranked Alabama beating first-ranked Miami in the 1993 Sugar Bowl and #1 Florida State beating #2 Nebraska in the 1994 Orange Bowl.
It didn't quite work in 1995, though, because second-ranked Penn State, as Big Ten champion, was obligated to play in the Rose Bowl. The featured Bowl Coalition game was again the Orange Bowl, in which #1 Nebraska defeated #3 Miami.
The three-year Bowl Coalition agreement was replaced before the 1995 season by the Bowl Alliance, which included only the Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar Bowls, along with six major conferences and Notre Dame.
The Coalition had allowed member bowls to bid annually for the championship game. The Alliance set up a rotating system, with the six top-ranked teams involved, again using the two major national polls.
The Bowl Alliance schedule:
1996 - Fiesta Bowl, #1 vs. #2; Orange Bowl, #3 vs. #5; Sugar Bowl, #4 vs. #61997 - Sugar Bowl, #1 vs. #2; Fiesta Bowl, #3 vs. #5; Orange Bowl, #4 vs. #6
1998 - Orange Bowl, #1 vs. #2; Sugar Bowl, #3 vs. #5; Fiesta Bowl, #4 vs. #6
In the 1996 Fiesta Bowl, #1 Nebraska beat #2 Florida, 62-24. However, the Big Ten's agreement that its champion would play in the Rose Bowl prevented championship matchups in both 1997 and 1998. Second-ranked Ohio State went to the 1997 Rose Bowl and first-ranked Michigan played in the 1998 Rose Bowl.
The Bowl Alliance was replaced by a new arrangement, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), for the 1998 season. The important difference is that the Rose Bowl is part of the BCS and the Big Ten and/or Pac 10 champion will be allowed to forego the Rose Bowl to play in the BCS championship game, if ranked first or second in the nation.
The BCS uses a complex formula to determine the two top-ranked teams. In addition to the AP and USA Today/CNN polls, the formula uses computer rankings, strength of schedule, average margin of victory.
The new agreement, like the original Bowl Coalition, attempts only to schedule a championship game between the #1 and #2 teams. After that matchup has been determined, the other bowls are essentially free to invited any teams they choose.
That fact created a mild furor after the 1998 season, when third-ranked Kansas State was ignored by the major bowls and ended up playing unranked Purdue in the lightly-regarded Alamo Bowl on December 30. Purdue's upset victory, however, seemed to validate the major bowl invitations to lower-ranked teams.