The Rose Bowl in twilight: Where does college football's most famous game fit in the future?
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Scott Dochterman
The Rose Bowl's iconic sunset doubles as a metaphor for its unsettled outlook in college football’s ever-changing landscape.
PASADENA, Calif. — Adam and Jennifer Musielak stood in line for 15 minutes on New Year’s Eve for a photo with the Rose Bowl trophy. When it was their turn, they crouched on both sides, leaned in face-to-face and nearly kissed it.
The Class of 2013 Indiana graduates, who now live in northwest Indiana, considered following the top-ranked Hoosiers to their first bowl destination no matter where their College Football Playoff journey began. But when they found out it was in Pasadena, the trip became automatic.
Why? Because it’s the Rose Bowl, and Indiana hasn’t appeared in it since Jan. 1, 1968.
“It was a no-brainer,” Adam said. “It’s a bucket list thing.”
“It is everything to us,” Jennifer added.
Thousands of Indiana fans this week made a pilgrimage west to Big Ten football’s postseason Mecca, participating in the pregame festivities despite an unusual downpour that dampened the atmosphere 24 hours before kickoff. They joined other crimson-colored fans from Alabama, the SEC power making its 10th Rose Bowl appearance. Crimson Tide fans clamored for personal memories just the same amid the palm trees and the stadium’s world-famous marquee.
For all of the Rose Bowl’s pageantry, its most recognizable tradition — a majestic sunset cascading across the San Gabriel Mountains as the fourth quarter approaches — doubles as a metaphor for its unsettled outlook in college football’s ever-changing landscape. The stadium is set to lose a tenant, with UCLA looking elsewhere in town. The bowl game remains a postseason institution, but it no longer represents college football’s premier event. Within this year’s expanded College Football Playoff, the Rose Bowl is just one of four quarterfinals, with some added ambiance. Will it remain special as the CFP’s importance casts an increasingly long shadow over the sport?
“We want to be part of that evolution with whatever it looks like,” said David Eads, executive director of the Tournament of Roses and Rose Bowl Game. “We will adapt, as we have done for over 137 years.”
The Rose Bowl once was first among equals in prestige and time slot. For decades it matched the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions in a relationship so deep that it thwarted college football’s efforts to crown a universally accepted champion.
For a sport that usually changes at a glacial pace, recent movements have brought an avalanche of disruption to postseason traditions. In 2024, the College Football Playoff expanded from four teams to 12, shifting four first-round games to on-campus sites. When the agreement to expand was struck two years earlier, the Rose Bowl was unsurprisingly the final holdout in amending its contracts. It hoped to retain its exclusive Jan. 1 broadcast window in years when it did not host a quarterfinal as part of its rotation with the Orange, Cotton, Peach, Fiesta and Sugar bowls. (It received no special assurances beyond 2025 but hosted Jan. 1 quarterfinal games in each of the first two years of the 12-team format.)
CFP leaders have a Jan. 23 deadline to decide on further expansion for 2026, and the calls to alter the postseason calendar or shift a second round of tournament games to campus sites have increased in volume. Both of those changes could further squeeze the bowls out of the championship picture and hasten the most famous bowl’s retreat from the limelight.
“I think the fate of the Rose Bowl and the entire bowl system, for that matter, lies in the hands of the 10 conference commissioners,” Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli said, referencing the group that charts the future of the Playoff alongside Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua. “If they continue to include the six bowl games as part of the College Football Playoff and continue to embrace the rest of the bowl season as an appropriate reward for their membership for a successful season, then the bowl system will continue to be a great American sports tradition that it has been for a long time.”
The Tournament of Roses Parade, which began in 1890, draws close to a million people to Pasadena on the first morning of the new year. After a one-off in 1902, the Rose Bowl Game became an annual event in 1916.
The Rose Bowl Stadium opened on Oct. 28, 1922, and has hosted five Super Bowls, the men’s (1994) and women’s (1999) World Cup finals and the 1984 Summer Olympics, and it is slated to host soccer in the 2028 Summer Olympics. But the signature event played on Jan. 1 is dubbed “The Granddaddy of Them All” for a reason.
In 1947, the Big Ten and Pacific Coast conferences joined with the Tournament of Roses to form a tri-party pact that committed the two leagues’ champions to the Rose Bowl. Together, the entities turned the Rose Bowl into a spectacle. It became the first bowl game to air coast-to-coast on radio (1927) and television (1952). Its attendance exceeded 100,000 spectators in 1950.
“People have grown up and advanced through life, turning on their television or coming to Pasadena and seeing live these two extraordinary events,” Eads said. “That’s what makes it special.”
Even now, Big Ten fans harbor deep-seated nostalgia for the Rose Bowl despite the CFP’s accelerating importance. For more than five generations, a trip to Pasadena provided a respite from the Midwestern cold and a chance to celebrate a special season. Now, Big Ten teams compete in other bowls for higher stakes. But for many fans — to paraphrase a slogan from the rival SEC — the Rose Bowl still means more.
Mike Marra, who earlier this week wore an Indiana jacket as he smoked a cigar outside a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, was 14 years old during the 1967 season, the only other time Indiana qualified for the Rose Bowl. He didn’t make the trip then, but he made sure to do it now.
“It’s a lifelong dream to get here,” Marra, who lives in Jeffersonville, Ind. “The Rose Bowl has always been something we always wanted to go to. I never dreamed it was going to be IU that we got to see.”
Players and coaches appreciate the game’s novelty and tradition, but it doesn’t outrank winning a national championship. Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, like many of his peers, sees the Rose Bowl now as a pit stop on the journey to the CFP championship, not the pinnacle.
“We’re playing at the Rose Bowl,” Cignetti said. “We played UCLA last year at the Rose Bowl, and I respect the tradition of the Rose Bowl. Been a lot of great players, coaches playing in it. But we’re getting ready to play a Playoff game.”
“We’re definitely going to take it in and we’re going to enjoy this moment, but at the end of the day, we know that this is going to be a Playoff game,” Indiana tackle Carter Smith said. “It’s do or die.”
The Big Ten’s staunch defense of Rose Bowl traditions once prevented the conference’s champions from playing in other bowl games. Ultimately, that cost Penn State in 1994 and Michigan in 1997 chances to win outright national titles. The leagues relented and opened up Rose Bowl access to others through the Bowl Championship Series in 1998 and then the four-team College Football Playoff in 2014.
The Big Ten still sends its champion to Pasadena as part of current bowl contracts, but that arrangement expires after Thursday. Next year, the Big Ten champion will have options for the location of its first CFP game, and the league office embraces that change.
“Taking into account things like travel distance and date of arrival for the team, it’s going to feel less like kind of that traditional bowl game moving forward, and a little bit more like a trip to play a football game,” Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny said. “Because, ultimately, that is what being part of the new CFP postseason means in the College Football Playoff for these bowls and these neutral-site locations.”
As long as it remains within the CFP, the Rose Bowl prefers to maintain the status quo, but it will adapt if required. Twice previously the bowl shifted off Jan. 1 to host BCS title games, including Texas’ thrilling 41-38 win against USC on Jan. 4, 2006. When New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday, the game takes place on Jan. 2 to avoid conflicts with NFL action. This year, the game kicks off one hour earlier (1 p.m. PT) to accommodate television interests, spacing out the three quarterfinals in optimal viewing windows for ESPN/ABC. The change is a significant one for patrons attending both the parade and the game, and it stretches thin city services and volunteers.
“Our preference is January 1,” Eads said. “We would like to see that continue.”
Beyond CFP restructuring, the Rose Bowl has other challenges. UCLA has played its home games at the stadium since 1982, but the school this fall notified the city of Pasadena — which owns and operates the stadium — it plans to move home games to Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium beginning in 2026. Pasadena officials then sued UCLA, which has a contract to play at the Rose Bowl until 2044.
The Rose Bowl Operating Company, a Pasadena governmental agency that runs the stadium, plans for $200 million in capital improvements to the stadium through 2044. Pasadena approved a $130 million bond refinancing plan in 2024 to restructure its debt payments.
But that doesn’t mean the Rose Bowl is in financial trouble, either. The combined festivities last year brought in an estimated $245 million in economic impact to Pasadena alone, the Tournament of Roses announced. According to its last federal tax return, it has nearly $49 million in net assets and generated nearly $150 million in revenue in fiscal 2024. Any thoughts of moving the bowl game out of Pasadena as the Cotton Bowl once did, shifting its game away from the stadium bearing its name to AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, are met with a scoff.
“I believe you’ll see Rose Bowl games being played in the Rose Bowl Stadium for the next 100 years,” Eads said. “It is the home of the Rose Bowl Game, and the Tournament of Roses is committed that the Rose Bowl Game will always be played in the Rose Bowl Stadium. There are no plans in our future to ever move that game from the Rose Bowl Stadium.”
Rain is forecast to impact the game for the first time since 1955, and more symbolic clouds hang over the Rose Bowl’s future in college football’s postseason hierarchy. But to those making their first trip to Pasadena, especially in support of a team that capitalized on the sport’s new rules to engineer a miracle turnaround, it’s a chance to stop and smell the roses.
Susan Walker played the piccolo in Indiana’s marching band from 1984 to 1988, and the Hoosiers finished 0-11 her freshman year. More than 40 years later, Walker watched her rain-drenched band successors perform at the Rose Bowl Bash. To her and her husband Jim, who watched Indiana’s only other Rose Bowl appearance on a black-and-white television, the urgency to see their Hoosiers in Pasadena was a dream come true.
“We just decided, ‘You know what, we can’t really wait for another opportunity, because we might not get it,’” Susan Walker said. “This has been incredible.”