The Rose Bowl between Penn State and Utah will be the last to feature teams from the Big 10 and Pacific 12 conferences in accordance with a contract dating from 1946. In 2024, the Rose Bowl will serve as one of the semifinals for the College Football Playoff, as it had in 2015, 2018 and 2021. But the real change will come in 2025.
That year, the Rose Bowl permanently becomes part of the expanded College Football Playoff, which will increase to 12 teams from the current four. That means the Rose Bowl will play host either to a CFP quarterfinal or semifinal every year -- regardless of the teams involved -- in conjunction with the Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, Sugar, and Peach bowls.
That also means the forerunner of all college bowl games, nicknamed "The Granddaddy of Them All," will eventually lose its unique identity. Instead, it will become just another widget in the money-generating machine that is modern college football, which television fuels.
The matchup between the Big 10 and the Pacific 12 conferences is just one of the Rose Bowl's singular traditions. They include the game's connection with the Tournament of Roses Parade and its contractually assured kick-off at 2 p.m. Pacific time, which gives the Rose Bowl an exclusive time slot precluding competition from other bowls.
Starting in the early afternoon means fans could walk from the parade route to the stadium, and anybody watching in person or on television could see the sun set behind the San Gabriel Mountains toward the end of the third quarter.
“As you might have noticed, lots of them have moved out here,” wrote Jim Alexander, sports columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News.
But when bowl officials signed an agreement Nov. 30 to join the expanded CPF playoff, they had to agree to risk sacrificing the game's traditional kick-off time. At stake was projected television revenue of $1.9 billion a year, an increase of anywhere from $1.23 billion to $1.43 billion per year.
"In our negotiations, we had initially asked for an exclusive window around the Rose Bowl game’s historic time slot," said Laura Farber, chairman of the game's management committee. "While we relinquished that ask, the tournament will continue to work with the CFP board of managers.
"It is our intent to keep the game on Jan. 1 at 2 p.m., but we need to remain flexible in scheduling as needed."
Unless Jan. 1 falls on a Sunday, forcing a scheduling change to Monday, the Rose Bowl always takes place on New Year's Day. But game management conceded the Jan. 1 date twice when the Rose Bowl served as the championship game for the now-defunct Bowl Championship Series. In 2002, Miami played Nebraska on Jan. 3. Four years later, Southern California played Texas on Jan. 4.
However, the management committee's concession on starting time could put everything in flux.
"Depending on where it falls in the rotation as a quarterfinal or a semifinal, the Rose Bowl could be played on Dec. 31, or a week after New Year’s Day," Alexander wrote. "It could be a day game, or a night game, or whatever slot the executives of the rights-holder decide would pull in the bigger ratings numbers."
Those decisions also could affect the Rose Parade, a staple of popular culture for more than a century. Would the parade remain on Jan. 1, even if the game is played on a different date? Or would both continue to be linked, regardless of the game's timing? Either decision could adversely alter interest.
One major bowl and the parade connected with it demonstrate how monetary demands can redefine or destroy tradition.
The Orange Bowl, which started in 1935, historically had been played at night after the Rose Bowl on New Year's. Like the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl would not take place on a Sunday. But when the Orange Bowl belonged to the Bowl Alliance, a precursor to the Bowl Championship Series, the time-honored custom of a New Year's Day game became superfluous.
The Orange Bowl's affiliation with the Bowl Alliance created a bizarre situation in 1996, when two Orange Bowls were played. The Jan. 1 edition featured Florida State against Notre Dame. Then on Dec. 31, Nebraska played Virginia Tech. As a result, no Orange Bowl took place in 1997.
From that point until 2015, the Orange Bowl has been held on Jan. 1 only four times. Since 2015, the Orange Bowl has been held in January only once. Formerly a New Year's Day staple, the Orange Bowl now takes place in late December to accommodate television.
Associated with the game for 65 years was a New Year's Eve parade, the King Orange Jamboree Parade, which attracted as many as 500,000 spectators to Downtown Miami's Biscayne Boulevard during the 1970s. Such stars as Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, and Muhammad Ali served as grand marshals.
NBC once televised the parade, but declining ratings ended the national broadcasts in 1997. Without television revenue, commercial sponsorship for the parade's illuminated floats collapsed. Attendance plummeted to nearly 20,000 in the ensuing years. In 2002, organizers voted 120-1 to discontinue the parade.
"It was poor quality ever since we lost the television exposure," said Al Cueto, president of the Orange Bowl Committee at the time. "It was difficult to attract the major corporations without the television contract."
Television revenue imposes even more dramatic changes in collegiate athletics. In June, UCLA and USC decided to join the Big 10 in 2024 and leave the Pacific 12, where both had competed since the 1920s. Financial demands dictated such a drastic change.
Just before the move, the Big 10 signed contracts with CBS, Fox, NBC, and Peacock. Combined with continuing agreements with FS1 and its own network, the Big 10 will receive more than $8 billion in revenue over seven years, or about $1.2 billion per year. Each college would get $62.5 million annually.
By contrast, the Pacific 12 collects $3 billion in television revenue over 12 years, or $400 million annually, with each college receiving $33.6 million per year.
UCLA needs the money fast. The athletic department lost $62.5 million in fiscal year 2021 and $102.8 million in three successive fiscal years, partially due to the inability to admit fans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being a well-respected, well-endowed university, UCLA faced the possibility of eliminating half of its athletic programs, mostly in such Olympic sports as track and field, gymnastics, and swimming.
UCLA and other universities also might have to face dramatically increased costs if the National Labor Relations Board rules on behalf of the National College Players Association, which filed a complaint against USC, the Pacific 12, and the NCAA on Dec. 15. The complaint seeks to reclassify college athletes as university employees -- who would be entitled to wages, overtime and workmen's compensation.
Ironically, the Rose Bowl's unsettled status with respect to the CFP at the time played a significant role in both universities' decisions.
"The uncertainty about the future of the Rose Bowl's place in the postseason ecosystem likely made concerns about the impact on the game from USC's and UCLA's moves less pertinent," wrote ESPN's Andrea Adelson, Kyle Bonagura, and Adam Rittenberg. "The thought being that if the playoff is going to expand as expected, the Rose Bowl was already going to be forced to reinvent itself in order to maintain a meaningful presence."
For Alexander, reinvention means dismantling a formidable identity.
"To people in Pac-12 country and people in Big 10 country -- and those of us in SoCal who are about to transition from one to the other -- the Rose Bowl and its tradition have mattered," he wrote. (Emphasis in original)
"Even when the parameters changed, and Pac-12 and/or Big 10 champions instead played in BCS or CFP championship games and other conferences began sending representatives to Pasadena," Alexander continued, "the Rose Bowl still had a hallowed place because of that 2 p.m. kickoff, which meant 5 p.m. in the East, which meant that snowbound folks in the rest of the country got to marvel at those third-quarter sunsets."
Then there is the acerbic contempt demonstrated by Yahoo's Jay Busbee, who called the Rose Bowl "a stubborn, infuriating roadblock to playoff expansion for years."
"One by one, college football’s old ways are fading into history. Good riddance," Busbee wrote. "Times change, and not even college football could stay stuck in the 1950s forever.
"Sunsets are nice, but cash is better."
Joseph D'Hippolito is a freelance writer who has covered politics, current events, religion, and sports. His commentaries on politics and religion have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Jerusalem Post, National Post (Canada), American Spectator, and American Greatness, among others. His sports coverage has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Guardian, among other outlets.
