SMQ: The historical significance of college football New Year’s Day bowls

Only four of 41 bowl games are being played on New Year’s Day this year. How significant has January 1 really been throughout college football history?

This season, only four of the 41 games on the postseason calendar (including the Celebration Bowl and the College Football Playoff national championship) are due to be played on New Year’s Day. With the first day of 2020 falling on a Wednesday this season many bowl games decided to push their games up a few days to December 28, the final Saturday of 2019.

While the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl maintained their traditional New Year’s Day spot on the calendar, the rest of the New Year’s Six bowls pushed their games a few days earlier. That includes both College Football Playoff semifinals at the Peach Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl.

This begs the question of how significant New Year’s Day has really been over time in the college football calendar. That is the subject of this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, as we go through more than a century of bowl games to see why we fetishize New Year’s Day so much — and whether our perceptions about the significance of January 1 have been overblown over time.

Early bowl history and the significance of New Year’s Day

When the Rose Bowl kicked off for the first time on New Year’s Day 1902, it set a precedent that guided the college football postseason for decades to come. That game, a 49-0 Michigan rout of Stanford, proved the last time teams met to play football in Pasadena for more than a decade. Such a mismatch could just as easily have soured the notion of playing football to commence the new year, but instead the Pasadena Tournament of Roses regrouped and reintroduced the game on the first day of 1916.

Since then, a New Year’s Day football game has been a staple. As other games came online, they took a cue from the Rose Bowl and also opted to start holding their games on January 1. There was always the occasional dip, when the games would shift to January 2 whenever New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday, but otherwise the trend was to play right away at the advent of the new year.

That wasn’t always the case, naturally, as there are always exceptions to the rule. San Diego launched the short-lived East-West Christmas Classic in the early 1920s. Up the road, the Los Angeles Christmas Festival popped up for one year in 1924. In general, though, the Dixie Classic and other bowls looking to emulate the Rose Bowl positioned themselves on the same day as the Granddaddy of ’em All.

That is why, as late as New Year’s Day 1954, you see the entire bowl calendar compacted onto that one day. From that point, though, we get a rapid divergence. By the advent of the 1960s, New Year’s Day as the predominant day on the bowl calendar was fading into obsolescence.

The 1960s and shifts in the significance of New Year’s Day

New Year’s Day 1960 marked the last time that even half of the bowl games were played on New Year’s Day. From that point onward, expansion of the postseason expanded the number of days on which college football fans could catch gridiron action.

The 1961-1962 calendar is instructive. That season, the Aviation Bowl and Gotham Bowl came online to bring the postseason opportunities into double digits for the first time since the immediate and illusory boom in bowl scheduling after World War II. The bowl games in Dayton, Ohio and New York City both fell early in December, far removed from the rest of the bowls. That set up the Bluebonnet Bowl and the Liberty Bowl to play a week later on December 16, in effect kicking off the multi-week bowl calendar we know today.

New Year’s Day became the exclusive domain of the big four bowl games — the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl. Every other game slotted in before the calendar turned into the new year. Through the 1960s and 1970s, there were no more than four bowl games played on New Year’s Day even as the calendar expanded to include a dozen or more contests in the postseason.

The chart above and the table below reflect these trends over time, showing that New Year’s Day has occupied a privileged place for the oldest bowls while the expanded range of games necessitated more days of action to cover that expansion.

Even as the bowl calendar proliferated and New Year’s Day became less significant in the overall picture, the predominance of January 1 in the minds of pundits and fans maintained a mythic pull.

Why New Year’s Day continues to seem so significant in the bowl picture

When we think about past postseason matchups, they more often than not fell on New Year’s Day. That was as much a consequence of the matchups as any other factor. The games that remained on January 1 were invariably the oldest, most prestigious bowl games. Those contests drew the highest-rated teams, resulting in legendary contests that linger in the imagination.

New bowl games that came online were less likely to draw national championship-caliber opponents. This is not universally the case, of course, as we have seen games like the Peach Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl gradually evolve into top-shelf postseason destinations.

By and large, however, the majority of these games pitted either top teams from lesser-regarded leagues or teams from the larger conferences that finished behind the champion. From the outset, those contests were destined to draw less interest in the moment — and less real estate in the collective memory — than the biggest bowl games.

Since the 1980s, however, New Year’s Day is more significant in the imagination than it has always been in terms of the national picture. When Miami beat Nebraska for the 1983 national championship on January 2, 1984, it marked the departure between reality and perception. The following season, BYU had the national title wrapped up before Christmas after completing a perfect season with a Holiday Bowl win.

For the rest of the decade, national championships were only sporadically decided on New Year’s Day. The rise of the Fiesta Bowl as an unaffiliated destination for top programs helped fuel that shift, as did the vagaries of a calendar that still avoided bowling on Sundays.

In some ways, the first efforts to crown a definitive national champion in the early 1990s were also efforts to maintain the sanctity of New Year’s Day on the bowl calendar. The Bowl Coalition hosted its title game each year on January 1, but once the Bowl Alliance replaced the Coalition that trend dissipated.

Over the three years of the Bowl Alliance, January 2 replaced New Year’s Day as the date of the championship game. From that point onward, leading into the Bowl Championship Series, there has never been a national championship game held on New Year’s Day. As a result, we are now more than two decades removed from January 1 holding the keys to unlocking the national championship picture.

Yet that lasting significance lingers in the collective imagination. An illusion borne out of the date fixed by the original postseason contest in Pasadena continues to hold an outsized position in our minds, long after the date itself became less critical to our conception of bowl games.

So when you look at this year as a matter of an anomaly, know that it isn’t a feeling that bears out in the historical record. That isn’t to say it is a myth that causes any harm, nor that it needs to be set aside once and for all. Know, though, that it is just that — a myth of overblown significance that hasn’t truly been the case for decades.