Football Down Under: Looking back at college football overseas

On Saturday, August 27th, California and Hawaii will launch the 2016 college football season when they meet in Sydney, Australia. That's right: Sydney, Australia.

There has been a push to put a bowl game in Australia for a few years. Melbourne had applied to host the Melbourne Bowl but the NCAA put a freeze on adding new bowl games until 2019. There have been so many bowl games added as of late that last year it became tough to even find enough teams to qualify for bowls; two Mountain West teams actually played each other in the inaugural Arizona Bowl.

So if you can't get a bowl game, just try to get a regular season game.

That's where the Cal-Hawaii game comes in. It will kick off the season a week earlier than everyone else and will be the first game in Australia since the 'Melbourne Bowl' back in 1987. That game was a bit of a failure financially, as only 7,652 fans showed up to see BYU beat a 1-11 Colorado State squad in a WAC conference game with little media coverage (the WAC held a game in Melbourne two years earlier between UTEP and Wyoming). A proposed matchup between WAC teams for the following year was scrapped after that disaster.

Now, 29 years later, college football is back down under. A game like this is a huge undertaking. Not only do you have that insane travel for an entire football team and staff, but you must bring equipment, passports for players, work visas for the staff and then prepare the players for a game played on the other side of the globe. Still, it is a great opportunity for the programs involved and a great experience for the players.

It isn't like this is some oddity for college football. College football has been played outside of the United States for over a hundred years. Back in the 1870's, Harvard played a series of games against Canadian universities in Montreal and around Canada. After the turn of the century, programs like LSU, Florida, Ole Miss and Auburn would play games in Havana, Cuba. In June 1976, Texas A&I and Henderson State played five games against each other across Europe in West Germany, France and Austria.

From 1976 to 1993, there would be a college football presence in Japan — mainly in Tokyo as the Mirage Bowl or Coca-Cola Classic — that included programs like Notre Dame, UCLA, Stanford, Clemson and Nebraska, and was actually the final regular season game Barry Sanders played for Oklahoma State (he watched the Heisman ceremony in a Tokyo television studio). Ireland has hosted several games, including Boston College and Georgia Tech on September 3rd.

There have also been bowl games in Toronto and the Bahamas.

With college football heading back to Australia after nearly three decades, it is a great opportunity to get footing in a country that loves football — albeit different from the professional American game, or, of course, soccer — and could be fertile ground to grow the sport.

Well, as long as more than 8,000 fans show up this time.