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agreements with individual teams. Eventually some of these agreements gave way to multi-year contracts, while at the same time, some bowls opted to remain free to negotiate with any team. To remain competitive in the marketplace, bowl organizations often selected schools prior to the conclusion of the season, frequently as early as mid-October. In some situations, bowls even made informal arrangements prior to the season with a particular team based on the historical success, or the notoriety of a particular coach.

As the bowl games became the status quo for post-season play, several conferences developed relationships with certain bowls to secure the conferences' respective champions a berth in post season opportunities. For example, the former Big-8 Conference (currently the Big-12 Conference) cultivated a close relationship with the Orange Bowl, and sent its annual conference champion to this game. Other conferences, such as, the Big-10 and Pacific-10, secured similar relationships with the Rose Bowl.

Over time, nearly every conference champion had an automatic tie-in to a particular bowl game, which was under contractual agreement with a given conference. This is essentially the primary cause in preventing the number one and two teams in America from regularly playing in a season ending national championship bowl game prior to the inception of the BCS. Because this number one versus number two match up was most often prevented, it is the one glaring success of the Bowl Championship Series movement and is radically defended by the elite power structure of college football.

As the popularity of the bowl games and college football grew as a whole, so did television's popularity and increasing capacity for broadcasting sporting events. The potential for revenue generated by televising college football games, particularly the popular bowl games, like all successful business ventures grew exponentially over time.

Naturally, different players in the college football market wanted a larger and more significant slice of the revenue pie, which had been exclusively controlled by the NCAA since the television resolution in 1952.

The Big-10 and PAC-10 Conferences essentially cut their own throats during this early era by limiting their bowl representatives to two teams and one bowl game, the venerable Rose Bowl. This hindered the schools within these two conferences as many people only identified the PAC-8 with USC and UCLA, while the Big-10 only branded two schools, Michigan

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