The Cotton Bowl is college football royalty. It isn’t the Rose Bowl, but it is part of the four-game set of traditional bowls which have been a staple of New Year’s Day (or January 2 when the NFL has January 1) for over 85 years.
Rose. Sugar. Orange. Cotton. Those four games defined college football seasons and created national championship memories for many decades until the Southwest Conference died in 1995 and the Cotton Bowl began what was essentially a two-decade period of exile to second-tier status before the New Year’s Six, created in 2014, restored the Cotton’s elite standing as a major bowl game.
That nearly two-decade period of exile — 1996 through 2013 — might mean that for a subgroup of younger college football fans, the Cotton Bowl really isn’t all that special. A lot of people grew up in a world where the Cotton Bowl did not mean much. However, from the late 1930s through the early 1990s, it meant quite a lot. Recent years have brought the Cotton Bowl back to the big stage as part of the College Football Playoff.
Let’s look at the most important and memorable moments in Cotton Bowl history. Giants of the game have played in this New Year’s Day classic: