SMQ: The FBS postseason and the history of bowl games
By Zach Bigalke
The Rose Bowl and the early history of bowl games
On New Year’s Day 1902, the concept of a postseason bowl game came into existence as Stanford and Michigan met in Pasadena for a challenge exhibition between two of the top teams in college football during the 1901 season. The game proved to be a mismatch, as the Wolverines dominated 49-0 to cap a 1901 season where they shut out every opponent.
For the next decade and a half, the Rose Bowl was not associated with football due to the lopsided nature of that inaugural contest. Finally, in 1916, two teams returned to California to resume the showdown. Since then, the game can boast more than a century of continuous existence.
The game spawned imitators almost immediately. The Bacardi Bowl intermittently took place in Cuba before the rise of Castro, treating teams with a trip to Havana as a postseason reward. Texas started to take advantage of the bowl game concept to create forerunners of landmark games like the Cotton Bowl.
Really, though, all these games struggled to get off the ground. Until the mid 1930s, the Rose Bowl was the one consistent player on the postseason landscape that might sometimes feature one or two other bowl games.