The Granddaddy of Them All (January 1, 1919)

A season (potentially) without a Rose Bowl, and the sour state of college football in 2020

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I.

They played the Rose Bowl on January 1, 1919, though at that point it was not yet known as the Rose Bowl, but as the Tournament East-West Football Game. Because so many colleges’ rosters had been depleted by World War I, the game was held between a pair of military service teams, as it had been the year before. They’ve played the Rose Bowl every year since 1916, in fact, which is when the game was revived as part of the larger Tournament of Roses festivities, some 14 years after Fielding Yost’s Michigan team beat Stanford so badly that they decided they’d be better off holding chariot races and ostrich races and elephant versus camel races instead of a foo…