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The modern day bowl experience began to take shape in the 1930's. In an effort to stimulate the economy out of the depression era, administrators and civic leaders recognized the potential economic impact surrounding the flow of dedicated fans following their teams to the bowl sites. Thus, the Orange, Sugar, Sun and Cotton Bowls helped stimulate the evolution into the modern day bowl picture conducted each year during the holiday season. The inception of these bowls around 1935 is considered to have ushered in the modern bowl era.

As the bowl games became staples, a bowl game invitation became traditionally viewed as an honor, saluting a team's successful regular season while simultaneously marketing the game to new audiences. The bowl games grew in popularity through the years, and they took on a more significant role in college football, becoming more important to all involved parties as money-making, prestige-building opportunities, while at the same time, becoming more regulated by the NCAA. Along with the television resolution in 1951, the NCAA implemented a certification process for the existing bowl system designed to protect the student-athletes and the universities. This certification process, still in effect today, requires the governing bowl committee's to meet certain criteria regarding game rules, conditions, marketing and pay-out to participants.

In it's early infancy stages, the television resolution was the great save for the NCAA, as the struggling bureaucracy was likened to a paper tiger as a result of the Sanity Code debacle. In 1948, the presidents developed a set of guiding principles, known as the "Sanity Code," to cut down on the emergence of organized recruiting and under-the-table financial allocations that were rampant and occurring with alarming regularity in big-time college football, specifically in the southern sector.

In 1950, two years after the sanity code was developed, the NCAA identified seven members - Boston College, The Citadel, Villanova, Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Virginia Tech, Maryland and Virginia - as flagrant violators of the rules. Does the SMU debacle ring a bell to anyone?

At the 1950 convention, the NCAA governing bodies asked the membership to expel these seven schools (identified as the "Seven Sinners"), which the majority of the voting members failed to do because of their belief that the scholarship rules instituted by the NCAA were unrealistic and unfair, especially among the southern schools who viewed

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