The Sugar Bowl is an annual American college football bowl game played in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Sugar Bowl has been played annually since January 1, 1935, and celebrated its 75th anniversary on January 2, 2009. The Sugar Bowl, along with the Orange Bowl and Sun Bowl, are the second-oldest bowl games in the country, behind the Rose Bowl. The Sugar Bowl is also a member of the Bowl Championship Series. Presently, its official title is the Allstate Sugar Bowl after its current sponsor.
The Sugar Bowl has had a longstanding--albeit not exclusive--relationship with the Southeastern Conference. From 1950—1995, only once did the Sugar Bowl not feature an SEC team, usually the conference champion. That relationship has been altered over the past twenty years due to conference realignments and the emergence of a series of coalitions and alliances intending to produce an undisputed national champion in college football, but the ties between the Sugar Bowl and the SEC have persisted and have recently been strengthened. Starting in January 2015, the Sugar Bowl game will feature the SEC and Big 12 conference champions (unless they are involved in the national championship game), an arrangement nearly identical with the relationship between the Rose Bowl and the champions of the Big Ten and Pac-12.
As a member of the Bowl Championship Series, the Sugar Bowl hosted the BCS National Championship Game twice (2000 and 2004). However, since the 2006 season, the BCS National Championship Game has been a stand-alone event, following one week after the New Year's Day bowl games. This means that, under the current BCS format, no traditional bowl game hosts the BCS National Championship Game, but that game is played at the venue of one of those traditional major bowls, rotating amongst the four sites, including the Superdome.
The payout for the 2006 game was $14–17 million per participating team. According to Sports Illustrated, the 2007 salary for Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan was $607,500.
Read more about Sugar Bowl: History, Game Results, Most Valuable Players (Miller-Digby Award), Appearances By Team, Broadcasting
Famous quotes containing the words sugar and/or bowl:
“The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.”
—Bill Bryson (b. 1951)