For many Boston College fans, the prospect of playing in New York City’s Pinstripe Bowl is a near-annual appreciation. The city is home to thousands of alumni who traveled northeast for their undergraduate college education, so bringing the Eagles closer to their second hometown is an opportunity to welcome college football into their backyard. The […]
For many Boston College fans, the prospect of playing in New York City’s Pinstripe Bowl is a near-annual appreciation. The city is home to thousands of alumni who traveled northeast for their undergraduate college education, so bringing the Eagles closer to their second hometown is an opportunity to welcome college football into their backyard. The draw of playing in New York is always obvious for anyone who ever saw pictures of holiday season decorations adorning Times Square and Rockefeller Center, but calling it home is a near-and-dear piece of the BC landscape.“Initial sales have gone very strong,” said Holtzman during the bowl game’s announcement press conference. “Nebraska [has] a lot of pent-up demand, and of course Boston College, you have a lot of Boston College alumni in the belt who regularly come to Yankee Stadium.”“Its status as a Tier I bowl game gives it a competitive aura,” I wrote at the time, “and its Big Apple location automatically instills it with a sense of drama. It’s become a staple for Northeast football, and BC joins Syracuse and Rutgers with repeat appearances under the famed frieze at Yankee Stadium.”“From early on in the season, both Boston College and Nebraska expressed a strong interest to play here, which is what you want,” said bowl executive director Mark Holtzman. “You want a motivated team, a motivated administration, a motivated fan base…You want star power on both teams. I think we have that.”Where that old Gotham Bowl game failed, though, is exactly where this game is built to succeed. The new era of the Pinstripe Bowl possesses significant emotional investment from conferences who understand the modern day ease of traveling to New York City. Unlike older days devoid of realignment and geographic footprints, the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big Ten each hold significant inroads to the greater New York City markets, and the overall growth of college football is driving folks to want new takes on familiar experiences. Like last year’s game at Fenway Park, the Pinstripe Bowl offers a new experience at a stadium that’s well-known and well-experienced in BC circles, and the interest to play another new opponent with a new, victorious outcome kicks off this week with unprecedented excitement.What they don’t know is how the Cornhuskers likewise house several ghosts within the Yankee Stadium corridors. They’ve never faced Boston College, but the 1962 Gotham Bowl is buried deep within the annals of the program’s storied national reputation. Long forgotten by extended traditions and more annual games, the second year of the two-time postseason game brought few positive memories beyond the 36-34 victory over Miami, and for both the Huskers and their Boston-based counterparts, a 50-degree day under the New York City sunshine is more than enough motivation to rewrite history under the historic frieze facade.“What chairman [Bob] Ready needed was a solid eastern representative,” wrote Ward, “and when Penn State accepted Philadelphia’s Liberty Bowl, followed by turndowns from Syracuse, Pitt and Army, the Gotham Bowl was dead.”For the BC fan electorate not located in the tri-state area, this year’s Pinstripe Bowl matchup against Nebraska carries slightly more urgency than the program’s previous two trips to the Bronx. While it remains a close enough game to visit for many Massachusetts residents, the three-hour commute to the boroughs carries all the more heartbreak from the previous two matchups.The Gotham Bowl didn’t survive, and postseason football didn’t return to New York until the 2010 Pinstripe Bowl featured Syracuse’s thrilling 36-34 win over Kansas State. Four years later, Boston College went to overtime in front of the largest crowd in the bowl’s short history, and three years after that, the Eagles returned to play Iowa in a 27-20 game eerily reminiscent of the subzero conditions from Nebraska’s 1962 trip to the Bronx.Boston College and Nebraska kick-off the 2024 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl on Saturday, December 28, from Yankee Stadium in New York City. Game time is scheduled for 12 p.m. and can be seen on national television on ABC with streaming coverage available from ESPN’s family of Internet and mobile device apps.
One year later, Baylor’s 24-9 upset over nationally-ranked Utah State allowed the 1961 game to play out of the Polo Grounds, but major issues for the 1962 game arose despite the one-mile move to Yankee Stadium. A doomed game, Nebraska and Miami famously struggled to draw a crowd larger than 7,000 fans after freezing cold temperatures submerged the northeast’s icy terrain, and Nebraska nearly didn’t arrive after financial woes threatened to fail reimbursements for the Cornhuskers.“Both Nebraska and Miami were on the scene [the day before the game] and word was definitely ‘go’ for [the] Gotham Bowl,” wrote the Associated Press release re-printed in The Boston Globe, “despite freezing weather, a week-long newspaper strike and financial problems. Although some 20,000 tickets reportedly have been sold, it will be surprising if more than 10,000 turn out at the ball park for the 11 a.m. game.”College football wasn’t nearly as structured when Nebraska last appeared in a New York City bowl game. A litany of defunct bowl games dotted the post-World War II era but wouldn’t stick beyond the Bluebonnet Bowl, which first appeared in 1959 and ran annually until dwindling attendance forced the cancellation of a game with deep ties to the Southwest Conference. Not many games in general lived outside of the so-called “big time” national games, and the Liberty Bowl’s appearance in 1959 was the only game to remain through the modern day between the Citrus Bowl’s first game in 1946 and the Independence Bowl’s first appearance in 1976.The Gotham Bowl looked to buck most of the trends from those other ill-attempted traditions. It was one of two games outside of the Deep South, but carrying New York City’s high-powered backdrop failed when Syracuse, the game’s main target, infamously opted out of postseason consideration in 1960. A later attempt to pair Army against Air Force likewise failed, but the inauspicious start resulted in the game’s cancellation.“There are teams eager to pay a visit to the bright lights of New York town,” wrote Gene Ward in the New York Daily News, “but the fans hardly could be expected to get excited over seeing them. Georgia Tech and Colorado were two who expressed interest in Gotham Bowl feelers, but the former is a 4-time loser, the latest being the upset by Georgia. The latter has suffered five defeated, including the unexpected setback by Air Force Academy on Saturday.The game itself launched Bob Devaney’s Big Eight championship runs, and Nebraska spent the next four years playing in either the Orange Bowl, the Cotton Bowl or the Sugar Bowl. By the turn of the decade, two national championships and a perfect, 13-0 season were on their way to Lincoln, and three straight Orange Bowls logged victories over LSU, Alabama and Notre Dame.
