Want Some Cotton With Them Roses, Sugar? How Football Bowl Games Came to Be

The dictionary defines a bowl as a round, curved dish that is open at the top and used to serve foods and liquids. In sports, a bowl is a giant, round or elliptical, concave, open-at-the-top stadium for watching a sporting contest, like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, or a sporting event itself, like professional football's "Super Bowl," which is played in a different stadium every year.

The first super-duper sports-watching bowl was the Colosseum in ancient Rome, built over 2000 years ago (the word coliseum comes from the Latin word colosseus, which means "gigantic"). The Roman Colosseum was built around 80 AD under the emperor Vespasian. It held about 50,000 spectators. The structure was used for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles. It was used for about 500 years and then fell into disrepair, becoming the ruin we see today.

The first bowl-place for playing football was built in 1914 at Yale University in Connecticut. The Yale Bowl was the largest structure of its kind built since the Roman Colosseum. The original Yale Bowl seated about 70,000 persons; renovations have reduced its present-day capacity to 64,000.

The first bowl-event in America was the Rose Bowl, played on January 1, 1902, between two college teams, Michigan and Stanford (Michigan won, 49-0) That game, however, was not played in a bowl but in a park. The stadium called the Rose Bowl, where the Rose Bowl game is now played every January 1, was not built until 1922. The first Rose Bowl game played there, on January 1, 1923, featured the University of Southern California and The Pennsylvania State University (USC won, 14-3). The stadium holds about 93,000 persons.

Each week in autumn, college football teams play opponents that have agreed long beforehand to play them. When all the scheduled teams have been played, usually before December 1, a team's season is over. However, if it has won many of its games, a team can be invited to play in a postseason (post is a Latin word meaning "after") bowl game later in December or early January.

Football bowl games are generally part of a large festival that includes parties, a parade, and other entertainment. People pay money to attend a bowl game and to participate in the other activities. Bowl games are also on TV. The more exciting and interesting a bowl game is, the more people attend it or watch it on TV, and the more money the bowl organizers make.

For many years, The Rose Bowl was the only postseason bowl game between two college teams. By 1940, however, four other postseason college bowl games existed: The Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the Sun Bowl. Now, nearly 40 bowl games are played each year, either in early and mid December and on or around New Years Day.

Eric Golanty, Ph.D., is professor of health, wellness, and physical education at Las Positas College. He is the author of several books including Ahead of Their Time,, which tells the story of the 1951 University of San Francisco Dons football team -- "the best team you never heard of." Eric Golanty's Website