Forde-Yard Dash: Bowl Season Edition
We are approaching the 120th anniversary of the first bowl game: the 1902 Rose Bowl, a 49–0 Michigan rout of Stanford. Unlike in recent decades, that game assuredly was not timed around the sunset over the San Gabriel Mountains; there were no stadium lights back then, so playing the fourth quarter after dark would have been inadvisable.
Thousands of bowl games have been played since then, many of them memorable but most of them fleeting in impact. We said quick hellos and goodbyes to the Bacardi Bowl in Cuba (seven iterations between 1907 and ’46); the Poinsettia Bowl (’05–’16, when San Diego ambitiously tried to be a two-bowl town); and the Great Lakes Bowl (a one-and-done in ’47, after the idea of December bowl games in Cleveland shockingly didn’t take root).
