The first college football bowl game was played on Jan. 1, 1902, and it was decidedly not a classic. Michigan beat Stanford 49–0 in the inaugural Rose Bowl. Among the lowlights: nine Stanford fumbles and its captain saying that his team was quitting with eight minutes remaining.
But in the nearly 121 years since then, football fans have enjoyed a multitude of exciting bowl games. The boss tasked me with picking the best of them, which is like picking the nation’s best pizza. To make the job more manageable, I split some hairs and created some subdivisions and made the following list:
The best of each of the New Year’s Six bowl games—the Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, Peach, Rose and Sugar. (Playoff games not included, check back for more on that later.)
