LOS ANGELES − There are few venues in American sports that have been consecrated by the memory of what its grandstands have witnessed.
Fenway Park in Boston, Lambeau Field in Green Bay, and so on.
There is, however, one athletic cathedral in an otherwise unassuming Southern California ravine that looms large over both its sport and the dawn of a new year: the Rose Bowl.
The theater of dreams in the Arroyo Seco is set to host a quarterfinal game in the 2024-2025 College Football Playoff. But the duel between the No. 1 Oregon Ducks and the No. 6 Ohio State Buckeyes gains as much of its importance from the highly-ranked title contenders and television product as it does from the pageantry of the event that historically invited top teams from Midwest and West Coast.
The game is inextricably tied to the Tournament of Roses Parade, beginning in 1902 under the banner of “Tournament East–West football game” in tandem with the parade that had been running since 1890.
The first game, held at Tournament Park on what is now the campus of Cal Tech in Pasadena, saw the Michigan Wolverines under Fielding H. Yost defeat Stanford in a 49-0 drubbing so bad that the game was replaced by polo and chariot races.
Football returned in 1916 when Washington State shut out Brown 14-0 to begin the New Year’s Day tradition in earnest.
The first New Year’s game held in the Rose Bowl stadium occurred in 1923 when USC defeated Penn State, 14-3.
For decades, the Rose Bowl hosted the winners of the Big 10 and Pac-12 conferences, often bringing top teams from the Midwest and West Coast to do battle in California. But in recent years, the bowl game has also been used in the College Football Playoff bracket, which began in 2014 and has brought teams from conferences like the SEC and ACC to Pasadena.
The game’s early years featured a team from the predecessor to the Pac-12 against an eastern team. The arrangement saw names such as “Pop” Warner, Knute Rockne, and Bob Neyland grace the Southern California stage on New Year’s Day.
In 1946, the then-Big Nine and Pacific Coast conferences agreed to have their champions meet in the Rose Bowl. The first game under the agreement in 1947 saw the Illinois Illini beat the UCLA Bruins 45-14.
The agreement held even as the conference that represented the West Coast changed through disbandment − caused by a pay-for-play scandal that would serve both as a prelude to the successor conference’s eventual collapse and as proof that history has a cruel sense of humor.
The first impingement on the established format came when the venue held the BCS championship game in 2002, seeing the Miami Hurricanes, then of the Big East, defeat the Nebraska Cornhuskers, then of the Big 12, 37-14 to cap off an undefeated season and put their name on any reasonable short list as one of the greatest college football teams of all time.
The BCS would cause the Rose Bowl to go off script in 2003 and 2005 when the conference champion Buckeyes and Trojans, respectively, had a date in the national championship game. They were replaced by Oklahoma and Texas, then of the Big 12.
Texas returned to the “Granddaddy of Them All” in 2006 when the New Year’s festivities gave way to the BCS National Championship game three days later. Vince Young’s Longhorns took down the then mighty Trojans to snap USC’s 34-game winning streak and claim the national championship in an early candidate for the “Game of the Century.”
The game would alternate between its traditional matchup of the Big 10 champion vs. the Pac-12 champion (or as close to it, as rankings allowed) and serving as a part of the College Football Playoff after the latter’s inception in 2014.
The New Year’s Day marquee will serve as a College Football Playoff quarterfinal game again in 2026. But before that, the Ducks and the Buckeyes must determine who will move on to the semi-finals in a matchup that returns the game to its most famous dynamic: powerhouses from the Midwest and West Coast facing off in Pasadena.
Rose Bowl stadium renovations announced earlier this month will − if completed as proposed − graft a field level club onto the south end zone of the 102-year-old stadium, imposing modern stadium design on the venerable sporting cathedral.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What is the Rose Bowl? History of the iconic college football game
