American Football: Too Big for Cups

Photo: adamr.stone / Flickr

All across the world, major sports events are known as cups, or athletes compete to win a cup. So why is it that college and professional football decides to name their events “bowls”. As a football fan, I originally thought it was because the sport of football is just entirely to awesome to be contained in a cup, and thus required a larger vessel. Considering that we stole the name of the most popular sport in the world, I didn’t think it was that big of a stretch. I was wrong, though, and the truth is far less bombastic.

In 1916, the Tournament of Roses Association began sponsoring an annual post-season exhibition game known as the Tournament of Roses Football Game, which pitted teams from the Pacific Coast Conference against teams from the eastern U.S. The popularity increased so significantly, that the Tournament of Roses decided to build a new stadium that mimicked the design of the Yale Bowl built in 1914. This stadium came to be known as the Rose Bowl and of course the game played there was called the Rose Bowl Game (see where I’m going with this). The Rose Bowl Game became so immensely popular that it didn’t take long for other cities to add their own bowl games: the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl (Interesting note: these original four bowl games are all in cities where the weather is mild: Pasadena, Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas respectively).

Fast-forward to 1951, when the NFL decided to call its all-star game the Pro Bowl, which may or may not have been to ride on the coattails of college football, which was more popular at the time. I don’t know this for sure, and couldn’t verify it, but I just thought I’d throw that out there. Then, in 1966, the Super Bowl was created as a championship game between the best team in the AFL, and the best team in the NFL. Ironically enough, the NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle wanted to call the game “The Big One” which apparently no one liked, and the name Super Bowl was only meant to be a stopgap measure until they could think of another name. Unfortunately for the NCAA, no one in the NFL was clever enough to think of another name, and now the NCAA is relegated to calling their Football Bowl Subdivision championship game the BCS National Championship Game. Of course, if President-Elect Obama gets his way, all of this may just be relegated to history.

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