Rose Bowl requests to be annual CFP quarterfinal on New Year’s Day

In this era of college football with the influence of the transfer portal, conference realignment, and the College Football Playoff expansion, there are very few traditions that remain. But on Tuesday, the Rose Bowl announced its intention to keep one very important tradition alive.

Of the 108 Rose Bowl games that have been played in the history of college football, 93 of them have taken place on New Year’s Day. This of course is preferred due to the annual Tournament of Rose Parade that has taken place in Pasadena, California dating back to 1890.

However, due to the CFP expansion to 12 teams, the semifinal matchups are set to take place a week later (January 8th and 9th), than they did this past season.

This of course means that if the Rose Bowl wanted to continue being a semifinal matchup, it would need to break the tradition of being played on January 1st.

Due to this, Rose Bowl management committee chair Laura Farber confirmed to ESPN on Tuesday that they have requested to be left out of the College Football Playoff semifinal rotation moving forward in order to continue playing its game annually on New Year’s Day.

“Because we’re the only bowl that has the date as part of our brand in the New Year’s Six bowls, it’s really imperative for us and important for us,” Farber told reporters via ESPN at Big Ten Media Days on Tuesday. “We don’t know when there will be a longform agreement. We’re hopeful it will be sooner than later, but that depends on when the CFP has everything ready to go.”

It will be interesting to see how this potential change could affect the future of the Rose Bowl in terms of viewership. The game has typically been one of the most-watched games annually of the New Year’s Six bowls.

This past season, the Rose Bowl matchup between Alabama and Michigan ended up being the third most-watched semifinal matchup ever. An average of 27.2 million viewers tuning into the game.

Now that the Rose Bowl is now unlikely to be a semifinal matchup in the future, we could certainly see it surpassed in viewership by other games much more often. But at least longtime college football fans are likely to have one longstanding tradition remaining in a sport that seems to be moving as far away from tradition as possible.

[ESPN]