New Year's Day Football Just Ain't What It Used To Be

Now that we are heading into the final week of the regular season for most college football teams, attention turns to the jockeying for post-season bowl slots. While stirring up my own memories of watching bowl games as a kid, it prompted me to do some homework. The research unearthed some very interesting facts. The following bullet points were found on Wikipedia. So I really didn’t have to dig too far, nor too hard. Nonetheless, from a historical perspective, I think you’ll find some of this pretty amazing.

 The first bowl game was the Rose Bowl game. The Tournament of Roses sponsored a game in 1916, but it wasn’t until 1923 that the game bearing the title we all have come to know was born. Thus, “the Grand-daddy of them all.”
 By 1930 the Rose Bowl was still the only post-season college bowl game
 By 1940 there were four games—Rose, Sugar, Orange and Cotton
 1950 saw a growth to eight bowl games and that held true through 1960
 By 1970 the bowl count increased to just 11 games
 1980 shows 15 bowl games and by 1990 the bowls expanded to 19
 The new millennium began with a major bump to 25 bowl games
 Today there are 34 post-season bowl games (yes, not a misprint)

As legend goes, bowl games surrounding New Year’s Day were brought about in areas of the country to promote tourism in warm weather climates. Due to long distance travel for many cold weather fans that followed their teams, building the games around holiday time made sense. Until some time in the 1950’s all games were, in fact, on January 1st.

Today, with 68 teams needed to fill the 34 bowl slots, the prestige of going to a bowl isn’t quite what it used to be. After all, there are 120 Division I college football teams, with over half of them going to a bowl. Bowl teams were a very exclusive group in the old days. As the number began to climb, there was still a very strong feeling of achievement and prestige associated with earning a bowl berth. Even as recent as 1990 only 38 teams advanced to fill the 19 bowl games. Now, the whole concept is a bit watered down. Whereas it once required being a conference champion, or a strong runner-up or third place finisher to play in a bowl game, we now have minimum qualifiers with a 6-6 overall record and bottom half of the league finish.

I guess it depends on what you call “near the holiday”, but I am not quite sure how the model of building bowl games around holiday travel fits the very early start of this year’s bowl season. Both the New Mexico and St. Petersburg bowls play on Dec. 19th. Does “made for TV” ring a bell for you here? Of course it does. ESPN owns both of these bowl games along with several others which are played prior to Christmas. ESPN plugs these games into their programming schedule helping whet the appetite for upcoming bowls that carry a little more cachet.

The bowl schedule stretches all the way to the BCS title game on Jan. 7th. Of the original four bowls, only the Rose and Sugar will be played on their traditional New Year’s Day. The Orange Bowl is Jan. 5th. On Jan. 6th, guess who fills the void between the Orange and the BCS title game two days later; come on, take a shot…the GMAC Bowl in Mobile, of course!

As many a player and coach will tell you, there is no bad bowl game because it beats the alternative of not going at all. The post-season game provides another 12-20 practice opportunities to develop younger players, it gives alumni and fans one more game to anticipate and enjoy, and it is important for coaches to be able to speak of bowl games and national TV appearances to potential recruits.

Through the 1970s and even up into the early '90s there were a whole lot more teams sitting at home watching the smaller select group who got to play on or about New Year’s Day. Today, if you are one of the 52 Division I schools not going to a bowl game, there’s a lot of pain sitting at home watching more than half of your associates still playing ball.