Bowl game
In North America, a bowl game, or simply bowl, is one of a number of postseason college football games primarily played by NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision teams. For most of its history, the FBS did not use a playoff tournament to determine an annual national champion, instead relying on a vote by sportswriters or coaches. In place of such a playoff, cities developed regional festivals featuring bowls. Prior to 2002, bowl game statistics were not included in players' career totals. Despite moves to establish a permanent system to determine the FBS national champion on the field such as the Bowl Coalition from 1992 to 1994, the Bowl Alliance from 1995 to 1997, the Bowl Championship Series from 1998 to 2013, and the College Football Playoff from 2014 through the present some bowls are still held.
Historically, the four "major" bowl games, originally played on New Year's Day, were the Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Cotton Bowl.
Bowls originally featured the very best teams in college football, with strict bowl eligibility requirements for teams to receive invitations to participate. The number grew from 10 team-competitive bowls in 1971 to 43 in 2023. Now the NCAA allows teams with 6–6 records and, since the 2001 season, sometimes even losing 5–6 and 5–7 seasons to participate to fill the slots. More than a quarter of 2023 bowl teams did not have winning records.
The term "bowl" originated from the Rose Bowl stadium, site of the first postseason college football games. The Rose Bowl Stadium, in turn, takes its name and bowl-shaped design from the Yale Bowl, the prototype of many football stadiums in the United States. The term has since become almost synonymous with any major American football event, generally college football, with some significant exceptions. Out of the dozens of modern bowls, two examples are the Egg Bowl, the annual game between the Mississippi State Bulldogs and the Ole Miss Rebels, and the Iron Bowl, the annual game between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers. In professional football, the National Football League holds the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl.
The term has crossed over into both Canadian football and North American soccer. A notable example is the annual Banjo Bowl between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League. In U Sports football, the two national semi-final games are named the Mitchell Bowl and the Uteck Bowl. Many North American soccer championship matches were titled the 'Soccer Bowl', including the United States men's college soccer championship from 1950 to 1952, the North American Soccer League championship from 1975 to 1984, and the North American Soccer League championship from 2013 to 2017.
History
The history of the bowl game began with the 1902 Tournament East-West football game, sponsored by the Tournament of Roses Association between Michigan and Stanford, a game which Michigan won 49–0. The Tournament of Roses eventually sponsored an annual contest starting with the 1916 Tournament East-West Football Game. With the 1923 Rose Bowl it began to be played at the newly completed Rose Bowl stadium, and thus the contest itself became known as the Rose Bowl Game. The word "bowl" to describe the games originates from the Yale Bowl stadium, which was the basis of the design of the Rose Bowl Stadium. Other cities saw the promotional value for tourism that the Tournament of Roses parade and Rose Bowl carried and began to develop their own regional festivals which included college football games. The label "bowl" was attached to the festival name, even though the games were not always played in bowl-shaped stadiums.The historic timing of bowl games, around the new year, is the result of two factors—warm climate and ease of travel. The original bowls began in warm climates such as Southern California, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas as a way to promote the area for tourism and business. Since commercial air travel was either non-existent or very limited, the games were scheduled well after the end of the regular season to allow fans to travel to the game site. While modern travel is more convenient, all but 5 of 41 bowl games are still located in cities below approximately 36° N.
Currently, college football bowl games are played from mid-December to early January. As the number of bowl games has increased, the number of games a team would need to win to be invited to a bowl game has decreased. With a 12-game schedule, a number of teams with only 5 wins have been invited to a bowl game.
, the University of Alabama has played in more bowl games than any other school, with 69 appearances. Alabama also holds the record for most bowl victories with 41.
Florida State held the record of consecutive bowl berths at 36 bowl appearances from 1982 to 2017. However, it is not recognized by the NCAA since the NCAA vacated FSU's 2006 Emerald Bowl victory over UCLA due to an academic issue.
The Rose Bowl was the only major college bowl game in 1930. By 1940, there were five major college bowl games: the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl Classic, the Orange Bowl, and the Sun Bowl. By 1950, the number had increased to eight games. This slate of eight bowl games persisted through 1960, but by 1970 the number had increased again, to 11 games. The number continued to increase, to 15 games in 1980, to 19 games in 1990, 25 games in 2000, 35 games in 2010, and 41 games by 2015. Up until around the 1950s, the small number of games were played solely on New Year's Day, with the only major exception being if the holiday occurred on a Sunday. The tradition of not playing bowl games on Sunday initially started from the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl not being held on Sundays for fear of spooking horses tied at churches, but in later years was done to avoid conflict with NFL games. For the 2016–17 bowl season, the 41 games require a little over three weeks, starting December 17 and ending on January 9. While bowl games were originally exclusive to warm cities thought of as winter vacation destinations, indoor stadiums allow games to be played in colder climates.
The attendance of 106,869 for the 1973 Rose Bowl set the Rose Bowl Stadium record, and an NCAA bowl game attendance record. The Rose Bowl stadium still is the largest capacity stadium and the Rose Bowl game has the highest attendance for postseason bowl games.
In the 1990s, many bowl games began to modify or abandon their traditional names in favor of selling naming rights. While some include the traditional name in some form, others have eliminated their traditional name in favor of solely using their corporate sponsor's name.
Prior to 1992, most bowls had strict agreements with certain conferences. For example, the Rose Bowl traditionally invited the champions of the Pac-10 and the Big Ten conferences. The Sugar Bowl invited the SEC champion and the Orange Bowl hosted the Big 8 conference champion. These conference tie-ins led to situations where the top-ranked teams in the country could not play each other in a bowl game. The national championship was decided after the bowls, solely by voters for various media polls, who tried to decide which team was best, sometimes based on wins against far inferior teams. As a result, there could be multiple championship titles and no single champion. This led to the term "Mythical National Championship", which is still used to describe high school national champions, since high school sports have state championship tournaments but not national.
Attempts to determine a national champion
Because of the vested economic interests entrenched in the various bowl games, the longer regular season compared to lower divisions of college football, and a desire not to have college players play several rounds of playoff games during final exams and winter recess, the Division I Bowl Subdivision long avoided instituting a playoff tournament to determine an annual national champion. Instead, the National Champion in the Football Bowl Subdivision has traditionally been determined by a vote of sports writers and other non-players.In 1995, the Bowl Alliance, formed by the major bowls and conferences, put in place a system where the two highest ranked teams would play each other, even if they were each affiliated with a different bowl. However, the Pac-10 and Big Ten and the Rose Bowl did not participate. Number 1 vs Number 2 bowl match-ups became far more likely, but were not guaranteed. After the 1997 season, undefeated Michigan was ranked first in both major polls, but as the Big Ten champion, they played eighth-ranked Pac-10 champion Washington State in the Rose Bowl. The top Bowl Alliance team, #2 and unbeaten Nebraska, faced one-loss, third-ranked Tennessee in the Orange Bowl. Michigan won by five on New Year's Day and the next night, Nebraska beat Tennessee by 25. The AP kept Michigan as the champion, but the Coaches' Poll jumped Nebraska, playing its final game for retiring coach Tom Osborne, in part because of their more lopsided victory against a more highly ranked opponent.
The following season, the Rose Bowl, Pac-10, and Big Ten joined the other bowls and major conferences to form the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS attempted to match the two highest ranked teams in the country based upon calculations from various sources, including statistics and coaches' polls, with one of the four bowl games in the consortium, the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl, rotating the role of "national championship." In 2006, a dedicated BCS Championship Game rotated among the BCS venues. The BCS Championship Game, while separate from the four main bowls, was still rotated among their sites. The Coaches Poll was contractually obligated to recognize the winner of the game as its national champion. However, other polls such as the AP Poll may deviate and pick a different team, particularly in years when multiple teams were equally worthy of reaching the game. In 2003, for instance, one-loss LSU won the BCS National Championship over Oklahoma, but the AP crowned one-loss USC champion after its Rose Bowl win.
For the 2014–15 season, the BCS was replaced by a new consortium, the College Football Playoff. The new system used a four-team single-elimination tournament, with its participants selected and seeded by a committee; the semi-final games were rotated between pairs of the six member bowls yearly, branded as the "New Year's Six": the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, then Orange Bowl and Cotton Bowl Classic, and then the Fiesta Bowl and Peach Bowl. The winners from the two semi-final bowls advanced to the College Football Playoff National Championship, played at a neutral site determined using bids. Members of the New Year's Six that were not hosting semi-final games reverted to their traditional tie-ins. The CFP then expanded to a 12-team format for the 2024–25 season, with members of the New Year's Six now either hosting the quarter-finals and semi-finals on a rotating basis. Like its predecessors, and in contrast to the officially sanctioned NCAA tournaments at lower levels, the College Football Playoff is not officially recognized as an NCAA championship.