Tuesday--July 14th, 2015

Randall Jette has been named to the Jim Thorpe Award Watch list.

Matty Vautour has a post about Jette.

A lot more pre-season honors for the Minutemen this year. Last year Phil Steele had four UMass players on his All-MAC team. This year ten. The Minutemen had no national award watch list players pre-2014. This year Tajae Sharpe, Matt Sparks, Jovan Santos-Knox and Randall Jette have made national watch lists.

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Hustle Belt reports four MAC DB's made the Jim Thorpe list.

John Calipari voted for the Bahamas Bowl Hail Mary as the play of the year for the ESPY's.

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Matty also reports Josh Maurer is excited to be broadcasting the Red Sox games on NESN after the All-Star break.

UMass radio announcers have done well recently. Rene Ingoglia went from the UMass football broadcasts to working for ESPN.

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SB Nation says the Colorado Buffs have been improving whether or not you've noticed.

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Phil Steele has a post on current win and loss streaks in college football.

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UMass tied MAC partner Miami (OHio) for 30th in a ranking of top public universities.

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The Notre Dame blog "One Foot Down" looks at the Irish's opponents and says UMass shows no signs of being a good MAC team.

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Vanderbilt tries to forget about the 2014 season.

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Former Florida A&M HC Rudy Hubbard (the guy who beat UMass in the 1978 FCS Championship game) has been nominated to the College Football Hall-of-fame.

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As long time blog readers know, I'm a life long amateur astronomer. Just about the time I'm wrapping up this post, the New Horizons spacecraft will be making it's closest approach to Pluto. I've got NASA TV playing in the background. If you're looking for a good summer read, try Percival's Planet, a fictionalized story of the discovery of the planet Pluto. When I went to the double star meeting last September at Lowell Observatory, I handled the controls to the telescope Clyde Tombaugh used to discover Pluto.

I am old enough to have been around during the start of the Space Age. it's sobering to realize that no one alive on this planet will ever witness another first time planetary fly-by.

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