Explaining the College Football Bowl Season

The college football bowl season is here. 

The 39 games spanning from December 20 through January 6 have been announced, followed by the January 13 national championship game between the winners of the College Football Playoff semifinals. In the Peach Bowl semifinal in Atlanta on Dec. 28 (Dec. 29 in Australia), the LSU Tigers will face the Oklahoma Sooners. Later on the same day, the defending national champion Clemson Tigers will play the Ohio State Buckeyes in the Fiesta Bowl, in Glendale, Arizona.

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To mark the arrival of bowl season, take a trip through college football bowl history. 

It began with the 1902 Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, when Michigan crushed Stanford. Bowl games didn’t immediately take off, and, in fact, that 1902 Rose Bowl was a dud. The Rose Bowl didn’t resume until January of 2016.

Other bowl games didn’t join the Rose Bowl for another 19 years. The 1934 college football season – ending on January 1, 1935 – was the first college football season with more than one bowl game. The Orange, Sugar and Sun Bowls began that year. 

The Cotton Bowl began a few years later, before World War II.

Keep in mind that college football began in 1869, so it took the sport roughly two-thirds of a century to arrive at the concept of multiple bowl games played as part of a postseason pageant. Even as recently as 1977, there were only 13 bowl games.

Bowls were exclusive events through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. 

In more recent years, the need for TV (ESPN) to have more sports programming inventory in the northern hemisphere winter has proved to be highly lucrative. It is more desirable for American television to have 39 bowl games with a lot of ordinary (6-6 or 7-5 record) teams than to have bowl games be only premium events reserved for elite teams which won at least eight or nine games in a season.

The bowl system has undergone a lot of changes, although many recommended changes haven’t yet taken place. A basic limitation of the current system is something called a conference “tie-in,” meaning that a specific conference is tethered to a bowl game.

A few years ago, a contract was written which basically said this: 

If a conference has a team in the four-team College Football Playoff, and that conference’s bowl tie-in refers to a bowl which is not a playoff semifinal, another team from that conference can make the “tie-in” bowl as long as it finishes in the season-ending top 25. This means that a team can lose three or four games and still make a top-tier bowl game if that team’s conference puts a team into the playoff AND the tie-in bowl is not a playoff semifinal.

Here is an example of this very case in the 2019 bowl lineup: 

Clemson, in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), is part of the College Football Playoff. That’s point number one. Point number two is that the ACC’s “tie-in” bowl is the Orange Bowl. This year, the Orange is NOT a playoff semifinal. The Peach and Fiesta Bowl are the two semifinal games. So, the contractual arrangement says that if another ACC team is in the top 25, that team gets to go to the Orange Bowl.

Well, guess what? Virginia, despite losing four games this season, snuck into the back end of the top 25. The Cavaliers are objectively worse than a number of other teams which did not get a top-tier bowl place. Yet, their conference affiliation and the contractual arrangement delivered them into a bowl game.

A four-loss Texas team from the Big 12 made the prestigious Sugar Bowl last season for the same reason. while two years earlier, in 2016, a four-loss Auburn team made the Sugar Bowl as well. The Big 12 and SEC both have a contractual arrangement with the Sugar Bowl. As mentioned earlier, the ACC has a relationship with the Orange. The Big Ten and Pac-12 are linked to the Rose Bowl.

In a more ideal world, fewer tie-ins will exist in the future. More good teams can play other good teams, instead of conference stipulations restricting the scope of matchups available for bowl games.

Bowl games are constant reflections of how college football has changed, yet they also represent how slow the sport has been to evolve over 150 years, since its beginning in 1869.

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