Bowl games - Robert M. Ours

More
than a century ago, Michigan and Stanford played a football game to top
off the annual Tournament of Roses New Year's celebration in Pasadena,
California. Little did those dusty players know that this first
postseason college football game would eventually lead to one of the
most watched and anticipated series of sporting events in the country,
competitions that would generate millions of dollars and be used to
decide the national champion.

In Bowl Games: College Football's Greatest Tradition,
historian Robert M. Ours shows how these games established college
football as a national sport. Bowl games were also used as charity
events and morale boosters during the Great Depression and both world
wars, and were among the first public forums that challenged segregation
in the South. In addition, Ours traces the steady march toward using
bowls to determine a national championship as well as the increase in
payouts. Throughout, amazing athletes and teams appear, some well-known,
others forgotten. The gridiron exploits of Kentucky's tiny Centre
College in the early 1920s and the great Hardin-Simmons squads of the
1930s and 1940s are featured along with top performances from future
professional stars, such as Don Hutson, Jim Brown, and Tom Brady. Some
of the greatest matchups in the history of football occured at bowls,
including Alabama's near upset of heavily favored Duke in the 1945 Sugar
Bowl and Ohio State's double-overtime victory against Miami in the 2003
Fiesta Bowl. The book includes period photographs, year-by-year bowl
game summaries, and a complete list of every major NCAA-sanctioned bowl
played up to 2005.

Whether
or not a playoff system in Division I-A college football emerges, and
no matter what format bowl contests take, there will always be dramatic
matchups, superlative individual performances, and enduring memories of
college football's postseason play.