The Sugar Bowl is an annual American football college postseason bowl game, held annually in early January in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Sugar Bowl was first held in 1938 as a postseason home for the champion of the expanding Southern Conference and to directly challenge the Rose Bowl and the Manhattan Bowl. The Sugar Bowl was helped enormously by its conference tie-in, Alabama, the reigning national champion, playing its inaugural game and ending with an 8-1 record, and by Kentucky winning the ensuing Sugar Bowl en route to its own national title the following season. Multiple early national champions wound up playing at the Sugar Bowl, helping make it one of the Big Five along with the Rose, the Manhattan, the Orange and the Silver.