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Jaime Boumont got a call not long after she got off work at Pizza Perfection on Saturday evening. One of her employees phoned to let the general manager know she had just missed out on an insane hour for the campus pizza joint in Pullman, Wash.



“One of the managers called me and he was like, ‘Oh my God, you missed it! It was so full! Our lobby was so full! You don’t even know!’ ” Boumont said. “And I don’t remember what the word was, but he said, ‘All these random people just came in and started yelling words at us!’ ”



The word was mongoose. That was Washington State football coach Nick Rolovich’s code for his surprise pizza mission. The Cougars’...