SMQ: The FBS postseason and the history of bowl games

Why does the modern college football postseason feature 40 contests? SMQ looks into the history of bowl games in this week’s edition.

In every other level of college football and in pretty much every other collegiate sport, there is a clearly delineated postseason structure that involves a simple dichotomy of haves and have-nots. The playoffs are designed to reward successful teams with a shot at a national championship.

Something approximating that structure is beginning to exist at the FBS level of Division I football. This is due to the recent development of the four-team College Football Playoff, which evolved out of decades of evolutionary steps toward a system designed to crown a definitive national champion.

But even in an era where the postseason is solidifying into bracket form to conform with other collegiate athletic offerings, bowl games still hold relevance. They are imbued with mythic qualities. Yet, more often than not, bowls are merely a venue for teams with between six and eight wins to get in one last paycheck and 60 more minutes of playing time for the season.

Even so, bowl games continue to linger in college football lore as a bridge between the memorialized past and modernity. Bowl games come and bowl games go, as evidenced by the shift in this year’s schedule. The loss of the Poinsettia Bowl and the Miami Beach Bowl coincided with the arrival of the Frisco Bowl, holding the number of bowl games at 39 in the 2017-2018 postseason calendar.

This week, Sunday Morning Quarterback sets out to learn more about the evolution of the postseason we know today as college football fans. Keep reading to see how the Granddaddy of ’em All in Pasadena spawned a cottage industry of imitators that evolved into the commercial college football behemoth of the 21st century.

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.

1935 and the impact of solidifying an early calendar of bowl games

In 1935, the Rose Bowl’s status as the only consistent postseason contest in college football finally came to an end. That year, during the slow march out of the Depression, a slate of four new bowl games arrived on the calendar. Two would eventually join the Rose Bowl on the top shelf of bowl games, while another still remains in existence to this day.

The Sugar Bowl was inaugurated in New Orleans that season. So too was the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Sun Bowl in El Paso, and the Poi Bowl in Honolulu. These days, the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl are in the regular rotation as College Football Playoff semifinal sites. The Sun Bowl continues to host annual contests in west Texas. And while the Poi Bowl has since been renamed, postseason football continues to be played in Hawaii.

The rise and lasting success of these introductions to the college calendar opened the door for a broader geographic coverage of bowl contests. By 1937, the Cotton Bowl also came into existence along with other short-lived contests. Florida gained two more bowl games in the 1940s as the Gator Bowl (now TaxSlayer Bowl) and Citrus Bowl were both founded during World War II.

In the process, the bowl game concept was cemented as standard operating procedure for rewarding seasons in college football. At this point, polls and rankings were still in their infancy. Even when they came online, they did not begin awarding postseason national championships until decades down the line. Bowls were ways to draw tourist dollars to sunnier climates for a spectacle that portends the later significance of population shifts toward the Sun Belt states.

The third wave of bowl development and a growing Division I

By the 1960s, the success of even new additions to the bowl calendar beginning with the 1959 Liberty Bowl opened the door for a third wave of bowl expansion in the 1960s and 1970s. Until 1978, Division I football was still a mishmash of teams currently in the FBS and FCS. Once 1978 rolled around, the split between larger schools and smaller schools altered the significance of bowls once again.

Soon after the subdivision of Division I into two tiers, the NCAA took charge of redesigning the look of the postseason for the schools over which they still maintained control. The I-AA national championship bracket has evolved over the years to the point where 24 teams now compete annually for the title of nation’s best among the smaller schools in the top division.

What this left, however, was a vacuum that bowl games tried to continue to fill. Legal battles between college football’s historic powerhouses and the NCAA further eroded the influence the national organization had on the top level of gridiron action at the college level. This period saw the development of other major bowls, such as the Peach Bowl in 1968 and the Fiesta Bowl in 1971.

Both were created to provide automatic bids to newly developing leagues. The Fiesta Bowl, for instance, was created as a way to remedy WAC teams like Arizona and Arizona State being overlooked for bowl invitations. Now it sits as the youngest of the major New Year’s Six games that get a triennial opportunity to host a College Football Playoff semifinal.

The exploding 1990s and the impact of a ballooning bowl calendar

By the 1990s, the powerhouses of college football were beginning to consolidate power at the top level of the sport. Control of television revenue was wrested away from the NCAA, and the top leagues began to seek ways to turn growing interest in college football into a more lucrative enterprise. They also sought to create more definitive results through the formation of a single national championship.

Early attempts faltered. The Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance were two early attempts between 1992 and 1997 to create a single national championship structure. Without the Big Ten or the Pac-10, however, the absence of the two Rose Bowl-linked conferences continued to present the risk of split national championships.

The bowl calendar continued to grow around these developments as bowls gained and lost prestige and affiliations changed between leagues and bowl destinations. As conferences gained increased importance and independence became less attractive to maintain during the 1990s, the expansion of some leagues and the rise of new conferences also facilitated more bowl growth.

Entering the 1990s there were 19 games on the bowl schedule. By 2000, that number had increased to 25 even with the rise and fall of several bowl games over the span. The shift toward a more decisive system would only accelerate the growth trend in the 21st century.

The BCS era and rampant growth of the 21st-century postseason

By 1998, the Rose Bowl had come into the fold of major bowl games and brought the Big Ten and Pac-10 with them. The short-lived Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance paved the way for the next iteration of the college football postseason. With the creation of the Bowl Championship Series, the top two teams were finally guaranteed to see one another in the postseason to square off for the national title.

Of course, the system was never without its own controversy. The tinkering with the formula over the first few years was an effort to solidify the transparency of the selection process. That tinkering backfired as the BCS — especially its reliance on computers — seemed to trip up the legitimacy of the BCS selection process.

Bowls continued to pop up on the calendar during this period. The 25 games of 2000 ballooned into the 30s soon thereafter, as leagues continued to consolidate and realign and bowl games continues to take on lasting significance to schools.

While the bulk of attention naturally focused on the two teams vying for national titles, the bowl system around that championship game continued to mature. The impact of ESPN seeking out content in the last era before widespread DVR technology and the shift toward mobile viewing played out was the growth of the calendar with network-owned contests.

Shifting from the BCS to the College Football Playoff and New Year’s Six

After nearly two decades, the BCS could no longer hang on as the system for determining a national champion and the best games of a given season. The move in 2014 toward the College Football Playoff increased the number of bowl games perceived as elite, the number of teams invited to play for a national title, and the number of bowl games more generally available to an ever-expanding FBS table of teams.

Not only did more opportunities open up for top teams, but more opportunities also opened up throughout the bowl game schedules. In 2014, as the College Football Playoff came online, five new bowl games were added to the calendar in Miami, Boca Raton, Mobile, Detroit, and the Bahamas. All but the Miami game remain in existence.

Last year, the bowl calendar hit a new record with spots for 80 teams in the postseason. Without a significant expansion of the number of FBS teams, we might just about be hitting peak bowl schedule. The addition of the Frisco Bowl in Texas was countered by the loss not only of the Miami Beach Bowl but also the Poinsettia Bowl in San Diego. For the first time in several years, there were more bowl-eligible teams with six wins than there were bowl slots to fill.

Bowl games continue to draw crowds to communities across the country. Not all bowls are created equal, however, and the costs versus the benefits continue to be weighed by schools both big and small. At once the system creates greater access for mid-majors while further entrenching power at the top.

The lasting significance of bowl games on the college football landscape

What can we learn from over a century of bowl games? Quite simply, they were a quirk of development that quickly evolved into the status quo. In the 1990s, the increased importance of conference affiliation and the diminished impact of the NCAA opened the door for a new system. But the powerhouses congregating to create a regular national championship game couldn’t detach their desires for a definitive postseason from the concept of bowl games.

That is how college football went from the Coalition and Alliance days into the BCS era, slowly picking up steam and converting intransigent conferences into the fold of true believers. All the while, smaller schools continued to be left on the outside. The WAC rose and fell as a result of falling out of favor with more established leagues. Eventually existence proved too much to ask for as the league collapsed as a football entity.

In a sport where myth-making is a critical part of its popularity, college football will continue to seek to create a postseason system that increases access while maintaining as much significance in bowl games as possible.

What will be the future of bowl games in college football?

Ultimately, these games remain sources of pride for communities. They remain fun rewards that mitigate the under-compensated economic realities of college football as a business and student-athletes as the labor pool. As the College Football Playoff eventually expands to eight teams, the ancillary bowls will continue to live out their days as the exhibition sideshows they were always designed to be.

Next: Predicting all 41 bowl games and CFB Playoff

In a time when so much importance is placed on crowning a single champion for the entire country, bowl games offer a different model that at once runs counter to the College Football Playoff system and yet works concurrently alongside it.. Not everyone will get to play for a national title, but dozens of schools can still end their year on a high note thanks to the quirky evolution of a unique postseason around the top level of college football.