Origins of the College Football Bowl System

The current College Football Playoff system is the fourth attempt to install a rational championship mechanism atop the college bowl system that emerged in the 1930s from a mishmash of postseason games and scheduling formats. The bowl system that developed was not inevitable. Other postseason models were tried and might have taken hold, but they did not. Likewise, other warm-weather cities might have become premier bowl destinations under slightly different circumstances.

While football conferences remain regionally focused today, the game was far more regional before WWI. Intersectional play was relatively rare due to varying eligibility standards across conferences, a national transportation system that limited regular-season travel, and faculties that frowned on extended trips during or after the regular season.

Today's Ivy League teams ruled the game but played primarily among themselves after feasting on lesser schools in the early season. A few contests with Mid-Atlantic and Big Ten schools dotted their home schedules, but even fewer intersectional away games. Yale did not play a game west of the Allegheny Mountains until 1931, and Harvard's appearance in the 1920 Rose Bowl was the first outside the East. Its first regular-season game outside the region came during WWII. A similar pattern occurred on the West Coast: California did not play a regular-season game east of the Rockies until 1947.

Northern and Southern teams also saw little of each other. Vanderbilt and North Carolina were more venturesome than others, but today's SEC teams played only a handful of games against the Big Ten or anyone else from the North until well into the 1920s. Rarer still were games between West Coast and Eastern teams. Traveling from anywhere east of the Mississippi to the morning shade side of the Rockies was time-intensive and expensive. Such trips generally occurred over the holidays and only when the Eastern teams received sufficient guarantees or gate receipts from multiple games to make the trip financially viable.

The first postseason games to warm-weather locales came when Chicago, led by Yalie Amos Alonzo Stagg, rode the rails west to play Stanford and their fellow Yalie coach, Walter Camp, over Christmas break in 1894. Their Christmas Day game in San Francisco was the first athletic contest between teams east and west of the Rockies. The teams played a neutral-site game in Los Angeles on the 29th before Chicago met the Reliance Athletic Club three days later, marking the first New Year's Day game played by a college football team. Carlisle, which played anybody anywhere, headed west in 1899 and 1903, but few teams followed them over the next two decades.

Few teams traveled to the West Coast and neighboring states in football’s early years.