Welcome back to Rose Bowl Friday where we look at one of the first truly famous games in the sequence of Pasadena Granddaddies. Georgia Tech beat California, 8-7, in a game that was notoriously decided by a player running the wrong way with a ball after a fumble and loose-ball scramble. The video itself is interesting in that it even exists for the time period, but the circular dizziness is clearly visible there.

But we digress: the USC Trojans won the PCC and declined to play in the Rose Bowl, for whatever reason, so the Golden Bears got the invite, despite a 6-1-2 record which including a 3-1 mark against small-college teams. Cal’s SOS ranking of 19th was still pretty solid, but the team ended up just 33rd in the SRS. That didn’t seem like the right matchup for the Yellow Jackets (No. 1 in the SRS, No. 10 in the SOS). Oh well …

Once again, the travel took its toll on a superior team from the East Coast: Georgia Tech had an 8-0 lead, thanks to the safety caused by Roy Riegels and his wrong-way run, but California scored in the fourth quarter to make it a close game: Golden Bears captain Irv Phillips—who we were lucky enough to meet in the early 1990s amid the farmlands in Greenfield, CA—scored on a pass from Benny Lom to make it close.

Lom was the Cal player who ran down Riegels from behind and prevented Georgia Tech from scoring more points on that disastrous turn of events (see what we did there?). The Yellow Jackets were 9-0 coming into the game, with only one victory against weak competition. They had only coughed up 33 points in those eight victories against major colleges. The Golden Bears fought valiantly to the end, despite the mishap(s).

This game set a new attendance record at the Rose Bowl for the time, with over 66,600 fans in attendance. In 2003, the College Football Hall of Fame and CBS Sports chose Riegels’ mistake as one of six “Most Memorable Moments of the Century” for the sport. That’s saying something, really, for an event that happened long before mass media made its mark on America. This always been part of the sport’s lore.