The Sugar Bowl took nine years to talk into existence.

Fred Digby, sports editor of the New Orleans Item, started pushing the idea in the mid-1920s. New Orleans had the weather, the hotels and the appetite for a party; what it lacked was a reason for a football team to travel there on January 1. Digby wrote about it, argued for it, and named it — the Sugar Bowl was his phrase, a nod to the industry that built the surrounding parishes.

For years nobody moved. Then his publisher, Colonel James M. Thomson, put the paper's weight behind it, and in 1934 the Mid-Winter Sports Association was formed to actually stage the thing.

The first game

On December 2, 1934, the association's executive board picked its teams. Tulane, 9-1, would host. Temple, unbeaten at 7-0-2, would come south. Columbia and Colgate had also been considered to represent the east.

The game kicked off at 1:30 in the afternoon on January 1, 1935, at Tulane Stadium, in front of 22,206 people. Each team took home $27,800.

It was, technically, a home game. Tulane was playing in its own stadium, which nobody seemed to mind.

Temple led 14-0 and looked like the better team. Then came the play that made the Sugar Bowl's reputation in its first hour of existence. Tulane quarterback John McDaniel fielded a Temple kickoff, ran to his right to pull the coverage with him, and lateraled across the field to Monk Simons, who ran 75 yards untouched. Tulane scored twice more after halftime and won 20-14.

3-2

The second Sugar Bowl, on January 1, 1936, drew 35,000 — a jump of nearly 13,000 in a single year. LSU represented the SEC. TCU came from the Southwest Conference.

TCU won 3-2.

That is a real final score in a real football game, and it remains one of the strangest results in bowl history. The crowd growth mattered more at the time: two years in, New Orleans had proof that Digby had been right.

Out of Tulane Stadium

The Sugar Bowl stayed on Tulane's campus for forty years, through the era when the game routinely decided or influenced national championships. In 1975 it moved into the Superdome, where it has been played ever since — one of the first major bowls to go indoors, which removed weather from the equation permanently.

It has left New Orleans exactly once. After Hurricane Katrina, the January 2006 game was played at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta while the Superdome was under repair. The city that invented the game to draw visitors spent that winter unable to host it.

The SEC game

More than any other bowl, the Sugar Bowl belongs to a conference. Its SEC tie-in ran for decades and gave the game its identity: if you won the SEC, you went to New Orleans. Alabama, LSU, Georgia and Tennessee treated it as a second home.

That formal arrangement loosened under the BCS and again under the College Football Playoff, where the Sugar Bowl rotates as a quarterfinal or semifinal site. But the association with the league never really went away.

Where it stands

The Sugar Bowl shares second-oldest status with the Orange Bowl and the Sun Bowl, all three first played on January 1, 1935.

The most recent edition was a CFP quarterfinal on January 1, 2026, and it was the best game of that round: Ole Miss beat Georgia 39-34, scoring 20 points in the fourth quarter and winning on a 47-yard field goal with six seconds left. It sent Ole Miss to its first Playoff semifinal.

Ninety-one years earlier, a sports editor had spent the better part of a decade trying to convince his city that a football game in January was worth the trouble. Twenty-two thousand people showed up to the first one. The Superdome now holds three times that.