In 1902, business leaders in Pasadena supported a football game that would match a top West Coast team against one from back East. With eighty-five hundred Football fans looking on, the Michigan Wolverines smashed Stanford, 49–0. Disappointed in the loss by the local team, the Tournament of Roses committee did not go after a second contest. The next Rose Bowl was held fourteen years after, when Washington State bested Brown, 14–0—and the football game has been played every year since. Beginning in 1924, contests have been held in the Rose Bowl stadium, with audience often topping one hundred thousand. Since 1947, when Illinois trounced UCLA, 45–14, the Rose Bowl opponents have been the champions of what today are recognized as the Big Ten and Pac-10 college football conferences. That tradition finished—temporarily at least—in 2002 when the Rose Bowl joined other bowl games in hosting the Bowl Championship Series' national championship game.

Throughout the twentieth century, nineteen Rose Bowl winners were crowned national champions. The first was the Michigan team that won the original football game. The fame of the Rose Bowl resulted in the founding of other postseason college bowl games. During the 1930s, the Orange Bowl (1933), Sugar Bowl (1935), Sun Bowl (1936), and Cotton Bowl (1937) were established. Other bowls followed in later decades.