The Rose Bowl is oldest continuous bowl game in college football. The very first Rose Bowl was played in 1902 and the game became an annual event after 1916. The very first game was conceived as an East-West game with Michigan coming west to Pasadena to play Stanford. Michigan crushed Stanford (the game ended in the third quarter because Stanford refused to keep playing). The game was such a devastating blow to college football on the West Coast that the organizers of the game chose to run races instead of play football. The sport returned in 1916 when State College of Washington played Brown University. The win proved that teams on the other side of the country and the game became an annual tradition that regularly is the most watched college football game of the year and perhaps the most difficult game to find tickets for.
Over the years the stadium has become as famous as the bowl game, but it was not until 1923 that the Rose Bowl game would take place at the Rose Bowl. The first few games were held at Tournament Park. Once the crowds became far too large for Tournament Park, the new stadium was built.
The bowl game extended a bid to a team in the Pacific Coast Conference, which was the conference that would later become the Pac-10. The other bid went to a team from the Eastern half of the United States. The early years of this game often found undefeated teams unfamiliar with each other playing in games that helped establish the sport in just about every region of the country. Without the Rose Bowl it could be argued that the development of dominant teams on the West Coast and in the Southeast would have seriously been postponed.
The only time the Rose Bowl found itself moved came at time of war. World War II forced the game to move to Durham, North Carolina to protect against a surprise attack on the stadium that would cost nearly 100,000 lives.
The predecessors of the Pac-10 and the Big Ten agreed early on, after World War II, to make the game an annual contest between the two conferences. The Rose Bowl experimented with a number of contracts between the two conferences, or in the Pac-10's case, conferences that would become the current conference. At one point Big Ten and Pac-10 were only allowed to play each other in bowl game. Eventually these contracts would end, though the game remained an important match up between the top two teams in the conferences until the BCS was established in 1998.
The BCS changed the game in that if a team was invited to play in the National Championship then the next team from the conference would be chosen as a representative. When the game was the National Championship in 2002 and 2006 the conference match up was suspended.
