Best college football prank Harvard Yale MIT balloon

ESPN: The day MIT won the Harvard-Yale game

Kyle Bonagura writes about one of the greatest college football pranks of all time:

"Patrons at a small bar in Pocatello, Idaho, were a bit confused as to why a stranger showed up intent on watching the Harvard-Yale football game one day in 1982. He tried to explain, but no one really paid much attention until he offered to buy all the beer.

"Had they been listening, they might not have believed him. He was only there because he received a cryptic phone call that consisted of just three words: 'Watch the game.'

"Still, the message was received. There was only one reason he could have received such a strange call: After four years, plans for an elaborate prank he helped design as part of a group of MIT students -- to this day willing to identify themselves publicly only as the Sudbury Four -- had been put into motion....

"All four had graduated at this point and were either pursuing graduate or additional undergrad degrees from MIT. Once they came up with blueprints for the cylindrical device, they cobbled together parts from wherever they could: a motor from one of their mother's electric can openers, contact points from a 1967 Ford Mustang and, most famously, a piece from a leather motorcycle jacket to create a piston seal....

"'I think we packed it up and sealed it up in 1979 after we had done that six-month underground test and so forth,' one of them said. 'And then I think that was kind of it. I think we all decided we really needed to work on finishing graduate school, getting a job and things like that. We kind of stopped working on it.'

"Added another: 'It damn near flunked all of us out of school trying to get this device built and solve all the problems.'...

"Four years later, in 1982, the Sudbury Four had gone their separate ways, but the idea to deploy the device was still alive inside the Deke house...."