By Brian Boone

During the New Year period, every major college football team with a winning regular-season record gets rewarded by playing in a bowl game. Only a few of these have ever factored into deciding a national champion, while the rest are purely for exhibition. Here’s a look into curious history of the college football postseason, and the biggest bowls of them all.

Rose Bowl

The Tournament of Roses Parade, is a big deal in Pasadena, California. Organizers aimed to attract more visitors in 1902 by staging the East-West Game. The January 1 contest pitted two dominant teams against each other: the University of Michigan and Stanford University. Held at Tournament Park, Michigan won 49 to 0. It didn’t become an annual occurrence until 1916, when Washington State beat Brown. The game wasn’t called the Rose Bowl until the Rose Bowl, the stadium, opened in 1923. Resembling and inspired by the elongated Yale Bowl sports venue, that first bowl game served as the template for all other bowls. Until a college football playoff system took root, the Rose Bowl typically featured the top teams from the Pac-10 and Big Ten conferences.

Orange Bowl

In 1926, civic leaders in Miami aimed to completely replicate the tourist-attracting Pasadena New Year’s Day experience, with a festival, parade, and a significant college football “bowl.” The Fiesta of the American Tropics was held in full once, then revived in 1932 as the Palm Festival, which culminated in two early January games. The University of Miami beat Manhattan College (which was paid so little it took a boat, rather than train, to the game) 7 to 0, and then lost to Duquesne 33 to 7. In 1935, the game was renamed the Orange Bowl, and it struggled financially until it became a high profile match-up, permanently, after the 1939 game featured #2 Tennessee and #4 Oklahoma, almost a national championship. Big Eight and Big East conference winners routinely competed in the Orange Bowl.

Sugar Bowl

College football has historically been more popular in the South than anywhere else in the country, and a contingent of business and media leaders from New Orleans saw what was going on with the Rose Bowl in California and figured it needed a similar bowl game to celebrate the sport and drive tourism dollars. In 1927, the New Orleans Item officially suggested that the city should host the “Sugar Bowl,” as the local Tulane University’s just-opened stadium stood on ground previously occupied by a sugarcane plantation. The game became a reality in 1935, when Tulane hosted (and defeated, 20 to 14) the Temple Owls from Philadelphia (led by coach and youth football architect Pop Warner). Remaining a major bowl throughout the century, the Sugar Bowl almost always included a team from the Southeastern Conference and often a team from the now defunct Big Eight or Southwestern Conferences.

Cotton Bowl

Fair Park Stadium was built on the State Fair of Texas grounds in Dallas in 1930, but in 1936 it was renamed the Cotton Bowl in advance of a January 1, 1937 college football bowl game organized by local oil tycoon J. Curtis Sanford. He paid for the event, the Cotton Bowl Classic, himself, which saw Texas Christian University defeat the visiting Marquette 16 to 6 in front of a packed house of 17,000 fans. By the end of the decade, the Cotton Bowl surpassed 40,000 in attendance. That stadium served as the site of the bowl until 2009, when it moved to Arlington Stadium outside of Dallas. Now one of the playoff bowl games, the Cotton Bowl (or Cotton Bowl Classic) often fielded the Southwestern Conference champion and a team from the Big 12 or Southeastern Conference.