Wharton, who signed with the Chiefs as an undrafted free agent shortly after the NFL Draft concluded in April 2020, was a part of the team’s 53-man roster when the defending Super Bowl champions took the field to open the NFL season in a game that was nationally televised on NBC stations.

During his four-year career with the Miners, Wharton established new Missouri S&T career records for quarterback sacks with 35.5 and tackles for a loss with 58 and was named honorable mention All-America on Don Hansen’s squad following the 2018 campaign. In 2019, Wharton recorded 59 tackles with 7.5 sacks and 11.5 tackles for a loss.

He was a two-time All-Super Region 3 selection and made the Great Lakes Valley Conference’s all-league team on three occasions, including earning first-team honors following the 2017 and 2018 seasons. In 2017, Wharton set a then school record with 21 tackles for a loss and 13.5 sacks, which ranked third in NCAA Division II that season.

In 1914, the MSM team beat Mizzou 9-0, spawning wild celebrations in Rolla according to reports. The team would go on to earn seven more shutouts, including two games in which they scored more than 100 points. The eight-game season was a perfect 8-0. But the team was not without skeletons — it was alleged that some of the “recruited” players were paid $100 a month by townspeople who wanted a winning team — with some of the players not even enrolled as students. In 1915, only five members of the perfect team remained on the roster.

Their findings? There was no foul play. The baseballs all met major-league standards. When juicing speculation resurfaced in 1994, the S&T research was cited in USA Today, causing one writer to call the rumors “ball-oney.”

Now that’s a win for the home team!

Bogan, a Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor emeritus of art at Missouri S&T, and Fillo, a video producer for the University of Missouri System at the time, created a 30-minute film that captured the story of the painting — and of Missouri, from Benton’s perspective. Created in 1991, the film won seven awards. It was re-mastered in high-definition format in 2012 and is available for download along with course curriculum for use in classrooms across Missouri and elsewhere.

Rocker and reality TV star Ozzy Osbourne visited S&T’s Experimental Mine in 2018 for an episode of Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour. Dr. Catherine Johnson and Dr. Paul Worsey assisted Ozzy and his children, Jack and Kelly, with setting off explosions in and around the mine for the A&E Network show.

Crane worked in the bridge structures department of Sverdrup Corp. and was assigned to the California Department of Transportation in San Francisco at the time. She supervised falsework erection on the Cypress Freeway (I-880), which had partially collapsed on itself. The temporary supports that Crane helped install gave rescue workers the opportunity to search for survivors while preventing further collapse. 

Keith Bailey, a 1964 mechanical engineering graduate, transformed a company and then transformed S&T athletics. He joined Williams Co. in 1973 and became chair of the board in 1994, when the company’s assets were $5 billion. Upon his retirement in 2002, the company’s assets totaled $38 billion. Bailey played varsity football and basketball for the Miners and is a member of Missouri S&T’s Athletic Hall of Fame. Bailey and his wife helped support the renovations of Missouri S&T’s football stadium (now Allgood-Bailey Stadium) and provided funding for S&T’s new indoor practice facility, known as the Miner Dome.

“While I was in the streets I made the decision that I was going to leave my job as an electrical engineer at Colgate-Palmolive and go to work ‘finding solutions,’” says Umoja, who was known as Eugene Jackson as a student. Umoja would also go on to serve as a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Broadcasters and founder of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters. In 1994, he helped launch the World African Network Cable System, which distributed news by satellite to 125 African American-focused stations in the United States.

The technology used to create Davy Jones from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” and characters from other films was developed with the assistance of Steve Sullivan, a 1989 electrical engineering graduate. In addition to “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, Sullivan contributed to the making of the “Star Wars” prequels and the “Iron Man” movies. He also worked on “Avatar.”

For his work, Sullivan won three Academy Awards for technical achievement for the MARS matchmoving system, an image-based modeling system and the Imocap on-set motion capture system, in 2002, 2006 and 2010, respectively.  

As a teenager, Kessler heard “fabulous stories of mining adventures in far-flung corners of the work world” from his sister’s boyfriend who was an MSM student. The St. Louis native, who boxed in high school, started the university’s boxing program and became a referee after earning a bachelor’s degree in metallurgy in 1924.

Kessler co-invented an improved metal casting process and consulted for nearly 50 foundries around the country. According to a 1955 article in the New York Times, he emerged as “the No. 1 foundry trouble-shooter in the nation.” And in 1979, he received the Albert Einstein award for technical innovation.

Kessler was known by millions of boxing fans as a referee on the nationally televised “Friday Night Fights” from Madison Square Garden in New York.  Among his more than 150 televised boxing matches, Kessler refereed 15 world title bouts, including two of Muhammad Ali’s. He was the first non-boxer elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame.