The New Year's Six bowls are the top six major NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision bowl games: the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Peach Bowl, and Fiesta Bowl. The New Year's Six represent six of the ten oldest bowl games currently played at the FBS level. These six top-tier bowl games rotate the hosting of the two College Football Playoff semifinal games, which determine the teams that play in the final College Football Playoff National Championship game. The rotation is set on a three-year cycle with the following pairings: Rose/Sugar, Orange/Cotton, and Fiesta/Peach. Using the final CFP rankings, the selection committee seeds and pairs the top four teams and determines the participants for the other four non-playoff New Year's Six bowls that are not hosting the semifinals that year. These four non-playoff bowls are also referred to as the Selection Committee bowl games. These six games focus on the top 12 teams in the rankings; to date during the College Football Playoff era, of the 72 teams to play in a New Year's Six game, only eight have been ranked lower than 12th. So, in all, twelve schools are selected for these major, top tier bowls. These are required to include the champions of the "Power Five" conferences. In addition, the highest-ranked champion from the "Group of Five" conferences is guaranteed a berth if the group's top team is not in the playoff.
The Bowl Championship Series was a selection system that created five bowl game match-ups involving ten of the top ranked teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision of college football, including an opportunity for the top two teams to compete in the BCS National Championship Game. The system was in place for the 1998 through 2013 seasons and in 2014 was replaced by the College Football Playoff. The four-team playoffs consist of two semifinal games, with the winners advancing to the College Football Playoff National Championship. If New Year's Day falls on a Sunday, those games traditionally on New Year's Day will be played the next day on January 2 in deference to the National Football League's Week 17, which marks the end of the NFL regular season. In June 2012, the BCS conference presidents approved the College Football Playoff to replace the Bowl Championship Series. Three bowls, Rose, Sugar and Orange bowls, due to their contracts with power conferences were part of the rotating semi-playoff games with three more bowls to be named. With issues about fairness and the Big East's BCS Automatic Qualifier conference status, talk of accommodating the Group of Seven leagues with a seventh participating bowl started up. On November 12, 2012 in Denver, the conference commissioners granted the top Group of Seven conference champion a guaranteed slot in one of the six premier bowls. In July 2013, Cotton Bowl Classic, Fiesta Bowl and the Chick-fil-A Bowl were selected as the other three rotating semi-playoff bowls ahead of the Holiday Bowl. Also, the BCS conference commissioners meetings selected Cowboys Stadium as the first host of the College Football Playoff Championship Game on January 12, 2015.
Bowl game conference tie-ins
Three of the bowls have tie-ins with the specified conference champions in the years they are not hosting playoff semifinals:
When the conference champion is unavailable, the bowls invite the next-best team from that conference. The Cotton, Fiesta and Peach Bowls have no conference tie-ins; as such, the best conference champion from the Group of Five ends up in one of those bowls if it doesn't end up in a playoff semifinal.
History and schedule
Games are listed in chronological order, with final CFP rankings, and win-loss records prior to the respective bowl being played.
