100 Glorious Years of the Rose Bowl When Stanford and Michigan State meet on the field on New Year's Day, they will become a part of the Rose Bowl's storied history, playing in the 100th Tournament of Roses game. A look back at the pageantry in Pasadena and the grandeur of the granddaddy of them all. Caltech 38, M.I.T. 9 As the Rose Bowl reaches 100 years, there is a long and distinguished list of those who have placed a stamp on it. But nobody has quite taken over the game like Dan Kegel and Ted Williams. No, not that Ted Williams. Their innovative game plan, put into place with nearly flawless execution, is just what would be expected from a university that has never lost in the Rose Bowl. Why, the California Institute of Technology, of course. The students from there infiltrated the Washington cheer squad before the 1961 Rose Bowl, stole the instruction cards and then returned altered ones, which at halftime spelled CALTECH, in big block letters, before a capacity crowd and 30 million TV viewers. That prank became legendary on the Caltech campus, not far from the Rose Bowl. This, in the early 1980s, got Kegel and Williams thinking. So, one night after 2 a.m., a small group headed to the Rose Bowl on a reconnaissance mission. When they got into the control room in the press box, they found the circuit diagrams for the scoreboard - an invitation for an electrical engineer with mischief on his mind. "That sealed it," Kegel said. It took more than a year - and more than a dozen trips to the Rose Bowl with friends - before a plan was in place. They built a small computer, placed it in a junction box and routed the wires through it, giving them access to the scoreboard and the sound system. Then on Jan. 1, 1984, they set up a portable computer and a couple of radio modems they had borrowed, and got a glimpse inside the stadium from a nearby backyard of a Caltech graduate as U.C.L.A. set about demolishing Illinois. In the fourth quarter, a puzzled crowd noticed, "Hi, Mom," scrolling across the scoreboard. Soon, two Beavers - the Caltech mascot - followed. Then the scoreboard itself changed. It read: Caltech 38, M.I.T. 9. The pranksters also played a raunchy Monty Python song over the sound system, but they had miscalculated the volume. "At 2 a.m. it sounded like the voice of God," Kegel said. But with all those people and the game going on, nobody heard it. The stunt turned them into brief celebrities. Kegel received credit for a class project and the mayor of Pasadena complimented them. The only ones not amused were the police. Their lawyer, whose fees were paid by a Caltech alumnus, negotiated a plea of loitering after dark in a public park. Since then, they have put their creativity and knowledge of circuitry to good use. Williams oversees the chips that go into Xbox consoles, while Kegel helped Google transition from 32- to 64-bit computers, and now works at Oblong Industries, which served as a technological consultant for the film "Minority Report." If only it felt a bit more subversive. "Somehow," Kegel said, "that doesn't have quite the same panache." Gutty Little Bruins Every so often, a college football team will earn a special place - and an endearing nickname - in its university's history: Stanford's Thunderchickens, Louisiana State's Chinese Bandits and Oregon's Gang Green, to name a few. Rarer still is a team that comes to embody a program. U.C.L.A.'s Gutty Little Bruins earned their place - and their nickname - with a 14-12 upset of No. 1-ranked Michigan State in the 1966 Rose Bowl. The Bruins, who had lost the season opener to Michigan State, were 14-point underdogs, and it was easy to see why: they had 200-pound defensive tackles in Al Claman and Terry Donahue, and nobody on the defensive line weighed more than 225 pounds. But as much as the nickname has been a point of pride for Bruins of that era, or those who played under Donahue as coach, it has been something to run away from - like the shadow of Southern Cal and the powder blue uniforms the school has increasingly darkened. Gutty and little might be charming, but being the big, bad bully is what a football program wants to be.