Bowl Games: College Football's Greatest Tradition

More than a century ago on a bright, warm New Year’s Day, Michigan and Stanford played a football game to top off the annual Tournament of Roses celebration in Pasadena, California. The Wolverines won easily, 49-0, and each Michigan player received three dollars for meal money during their stay in the Golden State. Little did those dusty players know that this first postseason college football game would eventually lead to one of the most watched and anticipated series of sporting events in the country, competitions that would generate millions of dollars and be used to decide the national champion.

For nearly three decades, the annual football match in Pasadena was the only major postseason contest, but in the 1930s, four more bowl games were established—the Orange, the Sugar, the Cotton, and the Sun—marking the beginning of an American sports tradition. Soon, New Year’s Day meant college football. Over the years these games have featured legendary players, including Joe Namath, Billy Sims, and Bobby Layne, and some of the greatest matchups in the history of football, such as Alabama’s near upset of heavily favored Duke in the 1945 Sugar Bowl and Ohio State’s double-overtime victory against Miami in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl.

Bowl games also helped shape the sport of football. In Bowl Games: College Football’s Greatest Tradition, historian Robert M. Ours shows how new tactics and coaching techniques were routinely showcased at these games, and it was only through bowl contests that top teams who normally would never play one another were able to test their brand of football and determine who had the better squad. Bowl games were also used as charity events and morale boosters during the Great Depression and both world wars, and were among the first public forums that challenged segregation in the South. Throughout this rich history, amazing athletes and teams appear, some well-known, others forgotten. The gridiron exploits of Kentucky’s tiny Centre College in the early 1920s and the great Hardin-Simmons squads of the 1930s and 1940s are featured along with top performances from future professional stars, such as Jim Brown for Syracuse and Roger Staubach for Navy. The book includes period photographs, year-by-year bowl game summaries, and a complete list of every major NCAA-sanctioned bowl played to date.

Throughout, Ours traces the steady march toward using bowls to determine a national championship (although none of these schemes has succeeded so far) as well as the increase in payouts for the games. Yet when the whistle blows and the game gets under way, all attention is on the action between the white lines. Whether or not a playoff system in Division I-A college football emerges, and no matter what format bowl contests take, there will always be dramatic matchups, superlative individual performances, and enduring memories of college football’s postseason play.