Here's the Thing: The Citrus Bowl

We need a new standard of measurement on January 2.

In the beginning, there was no postseason. The first college football game was played in 1869, and the Western Conference formed in 1896, but the first Rose Bowl wasn’t played until 1902. It didn’t become an annual game until 1916. There were other bowl games scattered through the 1920s — the Dixie Classic, the San Diego East-West Christmas Classic — but it wasn’t until 1934 that they added the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl to create a “bowl season”. Even then, they were simply exhibition games. The AP Poll, which started in 1936, didn’t even include bowl games until 1965; the final poll came at the end of the regular season. The AP national champion frequently didn’t even play in a bowl.

Iowa didn’t play in a bowl game until the 1956 Rose Bowl. At that time, there were seven bowl games, and the Big Ten’s Rose Bowl slot was usually the only place for a Big Ten team to play. In 1960, Iowa finished third in the nation but did not play a bowl game, because Minnesota won the Big Ten and AP national title. The Gophers lost the Rose Bowl, but flags fly forever.

As travel became easier and television took over the sport, the number of bowl games exploded. In 1980, there were fifteen annual bowl games. Twenty years later, there were 25. In 2010, the total number of bowl games reached 35, and there were enough bowl spots for every team with a .500 or better record to play in the postseason. For a team like Iowa — almost always with a winning record, frequently in the top 25, but rarely competing for a national title — bowl games became the gauge by which we measure a season’s success. I can’t give you the year-by-year result against any particular Iowa opponent, but I can name the bowl game, the opponent, and the result from every season of the last 30 years. For me, it becomes a bit of shorthand for Iowa’s overall record and placement in the Big Ten.