AI-produced: generated with AI tools and reviewed by Ayokunle Spencer.

College football's postseason begins with a blowout so lopsided that the sport did not return to it for fourteen years.

On January 1, 1902, Michigan beat Stanford 49-0 at Tournament Park in Pasadena (NCAA record book). The Tournament of Roses calls it the first postseason football game in the nation (Tournament of Roses), and the organizers hated how it went. With about eight minutes left to play, Stanford captain Ralph Fisher offered to concede, and Michigan accepted. Michigan had rushed for more than 500 yards (EBSCO Research Starters, "First Rose Bowl Game"). The Tournament of Roses Association concluded that football was a poor centerpiece for a flower parade and replaced it with something more reliable.

Chariot races and ostriches

What followed is the detail most people don't know. Polo was tried in 1903 and flopped. On New Year's Day 1904 the Tournament staged its first Roman-style chariot race, inspired by Ben-Hur (Sports Illustrated, 1968), and the races ran until 1915, when they were dropped as too dangerous (Newspapers.com). Over the years the festival's games also included ostrich races, bronco busting, tugs-of-war and a race between a camel and an elephant. The elephant won (Tournament of Roses).

The festival itself predated all of it, having begun in 1890 with the Valley Hunt Club as a way to show off Pasadena's winter weather to a country buried in snow. Football was only ever meant to be one more attraction.

It came back in 1916, and this time it stayed. Washington State beat Brown 14-0, still at Tournament Park, and the game has been played every year since (NCAA record book).

The stadium that gave bowls their name

By the early 1920s the crowds had outgrown the park. A horseshoe-shaped stadium, designed by Myron Hunt and modeled on the Yale Bowl (Sports Illustrated), was built in 1922 with about 57,000 seats (National Park Service landmark nomination). The first game played in it was a regular-season one, California over USC on October 28, 1922 (Los Angeles Public Library). The first Rose Bowl game there came on January 1, 1923, when USC beat Penn State 14-3 (NCAA record book). The Tournament of Roses Association presented the stadium to the city of Pasadena.

That building is why every postseason game in America is called a bowl. The shape named the stadium, the stadium named the game, and the game named the entire category. Every Gasparilla and Pop-Tarts and Duke's Mayo traces its noun back to a concrete horseshoe in Pasadena.

The moments that built the reputation

In 1925, Notre Dame's Four Horsemen — Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden — faced Stanford and Ernie Nevers. Notre Dame won 27-10 (NCAA record book), and the game did as much for the mythology of college football as any single afternoon in the sport's history.

Two years later, Stanford and Alabama played to a 7-7 tie. By the Tournament of Roses' account, that 1927 game was the first transcontinental radio broadcast of a sporting event (Tournament of Roses). The broadcast firsts kept coming. The Tournament dates the first local telecast of the game to 1948, though the 1947 game is reported to have been carried by W6XYZ, the experimental Los Angeles station that became KTLA weeks later (Bruins Nation). The first national telecast of a college football game followed in 1952, and the first coast-to-coast color telecast of a college game in 1962.

On January 2, 1950, Ohio State's 17-14 win over California drew 100,963. It is the first six-figure crowd in the NCAA record book's Rose Bowl attendance listings (NCAA record book), and by Sports Illustrated's account the first for any bowl game (Sports Illustrated).

The game that left California

The Rose Bowl has been played outside Pasadena twice, and the first time is the more remarkable.

Weeks after Pearl Harbor, wartime restrictions on the West Coast forced the game out of Pasadena. Rather than cancel, organizers moved the 1942 game across the country to Duke Stadium in Durham, North Carolina — the home field of one of the participants. Oregon State won 20-16. It remained the only Rose Bowl played away from Pasadena until 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic sent the game to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas (NCAA record book).

The pact

For decades the format was loose: a Pacific Coast team hosted an opponent from the East. That ended in 1946, when the Tournament of Roses Association reached an exclusive agreement with the Big Ten, then known as the Big Nine, and the Pacific Coast Conference, the forerunner of the Pac-12 (University of Illinois Archives). The first game under it was played January 1, 1947, with Illinois beating UCLA 45-14 (NCAA record book).

The Tournament of Roses describes it as the oldest postseason bowl agreement between two major conferences in the United States (Tournament of Roses), and it defined New Year's Day for half a century. Big Ten against Pac-12, in Pasadena, with the parade in the morning. Nothing else in the sport was that reliable.

The Pac-12 tie-in ran through the 2023 game. Conference realignment ended it, which means the Rose Bowl outlived one of the two leagues that made it what it was.

Where it stands now

The Rose Bowl joined the BCS in 1998 and the College Football Playoff in 2014, and it now rotates as a quarterfinal or semifinal site. Some of the old exclusivity is gone — the matchup is dictated by a bracket rather than by two conferences.

What hasn't changed is the setting. The parade still runs in the morning. The San Gabriel Mountains are still behind the north rim at sunset. USC has won the most Rose Bowls with 25, followed by Ohio State with 10 and Michigan with 9 (NCAA record book, results through January 2025).

The most recent edition was the 112th, on January 1, 2026, when Indiana beat Alabama 38-3 in a CFP quarterfinal — the Hoosiers' first Rose Bowl appearance since 1968 and a stop on the way to a 16-0 national championship.

A game that was shelved for being too one-sided has now run for well over a century, and it still gets called the Granddaddy of Them All. It earned the title the hard way.

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