BATON ROUGE — A day after picking up All-America honors from the American Football Coaches Association, LSU center Ben Wilkerson was added to the list of finalists for the 2004 Rimington Trophy, the award announced on Friday.
Wilkerson, a senior from Hemphill, Texas, is one of seven finalists for the award that goes to college football’s top center. Other finalists include: David Baas of Michigan, Jason Brown of North Carolina, Vince Carter of Oklahoma, Greg Eslinger of Minnesota, Marvin Philip of California, and Russ Tanner of Georgia.
Wilkerson was added to the list of finalists based on his performance over LSU’s first eight games of the 2004 season. In addition, Wilkerson’s placement on the AFCA All-America team qualified him for a spot among the seven finalists for the Rimington Trophy.
Wilkerson’s career and senior season was cut short after suffering a ruptured patella tendon in the fourth quarter against Vanderbilt. In 41 career starts at center, Wilkerson helped lead the Tigers to a 33-8 overall mark. A second-team All-America selection by the Associated Press in 2003, Wilkerson was also a finalist for last year’s Rimington Trophy.
The Rimington Trophy recipient is determined by a consensus of the four All-America teams: The Walter Camp Football Foundation, America Football Coaches Association, Football Writers Association of America, and “The Sporting News.”
The winner will be honored at the awards banquet at the Rococo Theater in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 8, 2005. The featured speaker at the banquet will be two-time Heisman Trophy Winner Archie Griffin.
The five-year old trophy (Nebraska’s Dominic Raiola, Ohio State’s LeCharles Bentley, Miami’s Brett Romberg, and Virginia Tech’s Jake Grove are past recipients) is presented by Canon USA, Black & Decker and Power Sentry. Since its inception the Rimington Trophy Award has raised over $300,000 for the award’s benefactor, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which is hosted by the Boomer Esiason Foundation that to date has raised over $25,000,000 for CF Research.
Rimington the award’s namesake was a consensus First-Team All-America center at Nebraska in 1981 and 1982, years in which he became the John Outland Trophy’s only double winner as the nation’s finest college interior lineman.