Great Rose Bowl Hoax

At halftime, the Huskies led 17–0, and their cheerleaders took the field to lead the spectators in the stands in a card stunt, a routine involving flip-cards depicting various images for the audience to raise.

However, a number of students from the California Institute of Technology managed to alter the card stunt shown during the halftime break, by making the Washington fans inadvertently spell out CALTECH.

[2] One author wrote, "Few college pranks can be said to be more grandly conceived, carefully planned, flawlessly executed, and publicly dramatic" than the Great Rose Bowl Hoax.

The students broke into the Cal State Long Beach dorm rooms where the Washington cheerleaders were staying and removed a single instruction sheet from a bedroom.

On New Year's Eve, three of the "Fiendish Fourteen" reentered the cheerleaders' dorm building and replaced the stack of old sheets with the new.

Some of the helpers were: Michael Lampton, later an astronaut; Reg Clemens, who became a consultant for research-and-development company Sandia Labs; Lon Bell, later chief executive of Amerigon Inc.; Harry Keller, later CEO of Smart Science Education Inc.; and Allen Berman, later a project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The students also altered the scoreboard to rename the game, "The Beaver Bowl" in reference to the Caltech and MIT mascots.

[citation needed] For the 2014 Rose Bowl, Caltech students built a large white "PASADENA" sign overlooking the stadium.