NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas just prior to the playing of Super Bowl LI on 5 February 2017
7 February 2024
With every new year comes the onslaught of bowl games: the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Aloha Bowl, and of course the Super Bowl. Why do we call these gridiron football contests bowls?
The word bowl is an old one, and the most basic meaning of the word has remained unchanged for over a millennium. A bowl is a round vessel for liquids that is wider than it is deep. The word can be found in Old English, such as this example from Ælfric’s Life of St. George, written in the late tenth century:
Athanasius ða ardlice genam ænne mycelne bollan mid bealuwe afylled and deoflum betæhte ðone drenc ealne and sealde him drincan, ac hit him ne derode.
(Athanasius then eagerly took a large bowl filled with poison and dedicated all that drink to the devils and gave it to him to drink, but it did not harm him.)
But what does this have to do with gridiron football?
Bowls are associated with sports because modern stadiums are shaped like bowls. The earliest use of bowl in reference to a stadium that I’m aware of is in the 14 November 1903 issue of the Boston Globe. The article refers to the newly built Harvard stadium:
Although the "bowl" of the stadium for the most part is now covered with temporary wooden seats, the company which has been constructing the stadium has placed more than 10 rows of concrete seats on the iron stringers above the number expected.
Because of their shape, stadiums are often given names that include bowl in the title. The first of these was the Yale Bowl, construction of which began in 1913 and was completed the following year. The name Yale Bowl appears in the Yale Alumni Weekly of 4 April 1913:
THE YALE BOWL
This proposed structure has been called the “Bowl” and rightly so. It is to be half below ground and half above; and the upper half is to be built upon a bank constructed from the excavation from the lower half. The whole building is to be in the form of an ellipse, of concrete, with wooden seats resting upon the concrete.
The Yale Bowl inspired the building of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California in 1922 to host the Tournament of Roses football game, which had been first held on 1 January 1902. An early use of the name Rose Bowl is from the 14 November 1922 Los Angeles Times:
An observer of the game between California and U.S.C. at the opening of the new rose bowl, writing for the Berkeley paper, seems to discern just enough good points about this mammoth structure amid surroundings of unsurpassed beauty to damn it with faint praise.
The game inspired other ones, which about a decade later were being referred to as bowl games. From the 29 December 1935 New York Times:
Dorais suggested that a committee be formed to investigate the bowl games to determine whether they are “healthy appendages or cancerous growths.” There was no action taken on this suggestion.
Bowl games are, with one exception, played between university teams. The exception is the Super Bowl, the championship game of professional American football. In the late 1960s, there were two competing football leagues, the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL). (In 1970, the leagues would merge into a single NFL, with two conferences, the AFC and NFC.) In 1966 it was decided that the champions of each league should play each other, and the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game was played on 15 January 1967, in which the NFL’s Green Bay Packers defeated the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. But the game was popularly dubbed the Super Bowl.
The name was coined by AFL co-founder Lamar Hunt, who was quoted in the 18 July 1966 New York Daily News as saying:
I think one of the first things we’ll consider is the date of the Super Bowl—that’s my term for the championship game between the two leagues. I’m in favor of playing it on a neutral site where we would be assured of good weather.
Hunt did not particularly like his coinage and never intended the name Super Bowl to be official. But the name caught on anyway, and in 1970 the newly merged league made the name official. An Associated Press report of 7 January 1970 records:
The man who gave the name to football’s greatest attraction sheepishly admitted yesterday that that he isn’t particular proud of his feat.
“I guess it is a little corny,” said Lamar Hunt, millionaire owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. “But it looks like we’re stuck with it.”
[…]
“I don’t know how I came up with it. It think it must be related to a ball that was popular with kids at the time. It was called super ball. It was tightly wound and very live. You could bounce it all over a house.
“My two kids—Lamar Jr., 10, and Sharon, 8—loved the ball. They played with it all the time. “[sic]So we got Super Bowl from super ball. Kinda silly, isn’t it. I’m not proud of it. But nobody’s come up with anything better.”
This last bit about the super ball must be treated with skepticism. After the fact explanations of a term’s origin, even by the coiner of an expression, are very often inaccurate. Other sources have often taken this explanation as gospel, even though Hunt, when he gave this explanation, said he was unsure about what inspired the name.
The more likely explanation is the prosaic one. Bowl was a well-established football term referring to a championship game between college teams, and the professional championship would presumably be at a higher, or super, level.
Discuss this post
Sources:
Clayton, Mary and Janet Mullins. “Saint George.” Old English Lives of Saints, Volume 2, Ælfric. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 59. Harvard University Press, 2019, 57.
Daggett, David. “The ‘Bowl.’” Yale Alumni Weekly, 22.29, 4 April 1913, 727–28 at 727. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858045561119&seq=749
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s. v. bolla, bolle.
Grimsley, Will (Associated Press). “Sports Angles.” Asbury Park Press (New Jersey), 7 January 1970, 47. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Kelley, Robert F. “Inquiry by Coaches Asked on Post-Season Contests.” New York Times, 29 December 1935, Sports 9/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Mullins, Bill. “Re: Antedating of ‘Bowl’ (Football Stadium),” ADS-L, 17 December 2023.
“NFL-AFL Tilt to Rose Bowl?” (16 July 1966). Daily News (New York), 28C. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“On the New Grounds.” Boston Globe, 14 November 1903, 9/4. Newspapers.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. bowl, n.1.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, Nov. 2010, s. v. Rose Bowl, n.2.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, Jun. 2012, s. v. Super Bowl, n.
Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Bowl’ (Football Stadium),” ADS-L, 16 December 2023.
———. “Slight Antedating of ‘Super Bowl.’” ADS-L, 13 January 2020.
Williams, Harry A. “Sport Shrapnel.” Los Angeles Times, 14 November 1922, 3.2/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Voice of America, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.