| 1917 Tournament East-West football game | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3rd Rose Bowl Game | |||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
| Date | January 1, 1917 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Season | 1916 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Stadium | Tournament Park | ||||||||||||||||||
| Location | Pasadena, California | ||||||||||||||||||
| MVP | John Beckett (Oregon) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 27,000 | ||||||||||||||||||
The 1917 Rose Bowl, known at the time as the Tournament East-West Football Game, was a college football bowl game on Monday, January 1, 1917.[1] It was the third Rose Bowl Game, and matched the Oregon Webfoots and the Penn Quakers.[2] It was played at Tournament Park in Pasadena, California, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles.
Scoreless at halftime, Oregon scored a touchdown in each of the final two quarters and won 14–0.[3][4] Oregon team captain John Beckett was named the Player of the Game when the award was created in 1953, with selections made retroactively. This shutout win was Oregon's sole Rose Bowl victory for 95 years, until January 2012; they made appearances in 1920, 1958, 1995, and 2010, and won again in 2015 and 2020. This was Penn's only appearance; other Ivy League teams at the Rose Bowl were Harvard in 1920 and Columbia in 1934, both winners.
Oregon and Washington were both unbeaten in the new Pacific Coast Conference that year, and tied in their head-to-head meeting. Oregon was invited to participate in the Tournament of Roses game prior to their final game,[5][6][7] despite the fact that Washington had one more conference win than Oregon, having beaten California twice. On the basis of the extra victory, Washington is credited with having won the conference that year.[8]