PASADENA, California – In the end, the skies opened up and it rained on the Rose Bowl. Some would say it cried.
Just don’t try to sell that to the smiling, dancing, happy (Valley) Nittany Lions who are practically floating off the field at the end of the program’s first Rose Bowl victory in 27 years. (Only the second ever.)
“It means the world,” said redshirt freshman linebacker Dominic DeLuca, who is blessed to wear Franco Harris’ No. 34.
“Hopefully he’s smiling somewhere up there,” DeLuca added.
Elsewhere, outside the competitive confines of the sacred stadium, it meant closure. Not the kind you’d want to consider if tradition and Keith Jackson mean anything.
No. 11 Penn State’s 35-21 win over No. 8 Utah marked the end of an era. It’s the last time the traditional fighters will meet at the Rose Bowl for the foreseeable future. Whether the Big Ten and Pac-12 will ever face each other again in Pasadena will be more of a coincidence.
After the 2023 season, the Rose Bowl will be a College Football Playoff semifinals. So, just by chance, a Big Ten and/or Pac-12 team will play in the game. For various reasons, the same circumstances will apply from the debut of the 12-team playoffs in 2024.
“It dawned on us … that we’re going to play each other in the last ‘traditional Rose Bowl,'” Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft told CBS Sports. “For someone who grew up in the Midwest and the Big Ten, that’s it. It’s really the grandfather. So having a moment like that is surreal.”
The finality was palpable, though: This definitely wasn’t your grandfather’s grandfather.
Ever since the Rose Bowl reluctantly joined the BCS in 1998, it has been a difficult relationship between tradition and evolution. The game Pac-8/10/12 against Big Ten was especially appreciated by the Rose Bowl traditionalists. For 54 years in a row (1947-2000) the champions of the conferences met here.
Then BCS intervened. To participate, the Rose Bowl, Big Ten and Pac-12 agreed to give up their exclusivity to be part of the first college football championship to be decided on the field. The Rose’s first shot in the BCS rotation came in 2002. Miami faced Nebraska for the national championship. People from both schools came back from Pasadena and commented that the welcome was anything but warm.
This was further demonstrated the next year when Oklahoma played Washington State in front of just 87,000 fans, 6,000 short of capacity. Since the college football playoffs debuted in 2014, the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions have only met once (2020, Ohio State vs. Washington).
In the 16 years leading up to 2014, the Rose Bowl got its traditional matchup 10 times. This ratio will shrink significantly in the future.
The issue came to a head late last year when the Rose Bowl reluctantly agreed with the CFP on the parameters of the extended 12-year playoff in 2024. In a sport that’s grown bigger than the first, oldest bowl, he’s run out of leverage.
The Rose Bowl had been waiting to play at its traditional kick-off time of Jan. 1, 5 p.m. ET. It was said no. From 2026, it will be populated with all teams that are in the system at any time the CFP deems necessary.
“I don’t say that with offense, but we’re not the Guaranteed Rate Bowl,” Laura Farber, chair of the Tournament of Roses Management Committee, said before the game. “I had to look up where that bowl was happening. We will always be the Rose Bowl.”
You wouldn’t get an argument from the Nittany Lions. As a young administrator, Kraft — a former Walk On from Indiana — vowed never to set foot in the Rose Bowl unless the team he worked for was playing there.
“No, it’s too special,” Kraft told CBS Sports. “Got to earn it.”
On the most sacred ground, Kraft fulfilled his wish. Never mind that Utah was in the Mountain West earlier in the century or that Big Ten flagships Michigan and Ohio State — both of whom defeated Penn State — were kicked out of the CFP on Saturday.
But it was history with a touch of melancholy. For the first time since 2017, the game did not kick off in the sunshine.
Try again to tell Penn State this doesn’t mean anything. The Nittany Lions won the game for the first time since 1995. This was her fifth appearance at the Rose Bowl since 1923.
On the 100th anniversary of that appearance, Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford recalled his first time on the West Coast in fourth or fifth grade. His father surprised him with a trip to a football camp.
“I just remember really falling in love with football, especially the quarterback position,” Clifford said.
In the last game of his collegiate career, Clifford was the Rose Bowl offensive MVP, throwing for 279 yards and two touchdowns.
There’s a lifeline for tradition out there. After the 2024 and 2025 seasons, if the Pac-12 and/or Big Ten champions rank in the top four and receive a bye, the top-ranked of those two will be guaranteed a spot if that year’s Rose Bowl is a quarterfinal . If that had been the case this season, Michigan would have played the winner of Ohio State and Kansas State in Pasadena as the Big Ten champion.
“The Rose Bowl is iconic,” said CFP executive director Bill Hancock.
Monday was another reminder that it’s not exclusive.
By essentially giving the Rose Bowl an ultimatum, the CFP stakeholders bolstered what had become a 12-team playoff. The games themselves are more important than when or where they are played.
Farber was asked if a playoff game between Alabama and Cincinnati at the Rose Bowl will be significant to his grand tradition?
“That’s a really good question,” she said. “You know we’re in the Alabama fight song? … Tradition is what you make of it. We also have to evolve. We need a balance between tradition and innovation.”
Rain failed to dampen Penn State’s party. It heralded that new era where the sun might not shine on the Rose Bowl all the time in terms of their traditional matchup.
“I’m not trying to sound snotty or anything,” Farber said. “But we’re the ‘grandfather of them all’.”
Yes, but for how long?