It was suggested staging a post-season football game to draw more interest and spectators.  The game was very profitable. However, organizers were afraid that the lopsided result would discourage fans from returning in 1903, so they replaced football with chariot racing. After amateur drivers didn't work out because they kept colliding with one another, professionals were brought in to race the chariots. Then spectators began to suspect the races were fixed, so the committee decided to try football again.

The second Tournament of Roses game, as it was then called, took place in 1916, when Washington State beat Brown, 14-0.

Originally played in Pasadena's Tournament Park, the game moved into a big new stadium, the Rose Bowl, in 1923, when it was named for the stadium.

After World War II, a number of new bowl games sprang up, most of them rather short-lived. Among them were the Cigar Bowl in Tampa, the Camellia Bowl in Lafayette, Louisiana, the Delta Bowl in Memphis, the Dixie Bowl in Birmingham, the Great Lakes Bowl in Cleveland, the Harbor Bowl in San Diego, the Oil Bowl in Houston, the Raisin Bowl in Fresno, and the Salad Bowl in Phoenix.

However, two post-season games founded in that period are still in existence, the Gator Bowl and the Florida Citrus Bowl. A third, San Antonio's Alamo Bowl, was revived in 1993 after having been played just once before, in 1947.

Recently, television exposure for sponsoring companies has become as important as the money paid for television rights - and, in some cases, probably more important.

To avoid programming conflicts, the "bowl season" has been greatly extended. The original bowls were all played on New Years Day. Now the first bowl game is played about a week before Christmas and the last is played early in January, but after New Years.