Dominic Espinosa named to Rimington Trophy Watch List

Texas junior center Dominic Espinosa has been selected to the watch list for the 2013 Rimington Trophy, honoring the nation’s top center, the Rimington Trophy Committee has announced.

Espinosa is a third-year offensive lineman who has played in 26 career games, all starts at center over the last two seasons.

In 2012, Espinosa helped the Horns post the 23rd-best scoring offense in the country (35.7 ppg) and rank 40th in total yards (434.6 pg), as well as allowing just 4.1 tackles for loss per game (No. 3 in the FBS) and 1.23 sacks (22nd in FBS) per game. The offense also posted at least 400 total yards of offense in nine games last season.

Espinosa, from Cedar Park, Texas, was named to the 2011 Yahoo! Sports Freshman All-America Second Team. As a prepster he was an all-state and two-time first-team all-district selection. He played in the 2010 U.S. Army All-American Bowl and was ranked the third-best center by ESPNU.

Espinosa was named to the UT Athletics Director's Honor Roll (Spring 2011) and was a 2011 second team Academic All-Big 12 choice.

The winner of the Rimington Trophy will be chosen through cumulative votes of four All-America teams, including the American Football Coaches Association, the Walter Camp Football Foundation, the Sporting News and the Football Writers Association of America.

The winner will then be honored at Rimington Trophy Presentation banquet at the Rococo Theater in Lincoln, Neb., on January 11, 2014.

Former Longhorn Chris Hall was named a Rimington Trophy finalist in 2009.

The Rimington Trophy is presented annually to the Most Outstanding Center in NCAA Division I-A College Football. Since its inception, the Rimington Trophy has raised over $2 million for the cystic fibrosis community. The fourteen-year old award is overseen by the Boomer Esiason Foundation, which is committed to finding a cure for cystic fibrosis and has raised nearly $100 million for CF Research.

Dave Rimington, the award's namesake, was a consensus first-team All-America center at the University of Nebraska in 1981 and 1982, during which time he became the John Outland Trophy's only double winner as the nation's finest college interior lineman.

People are taking notice and expecting big thing out of this team. David Ash, Jackson Jeffcoat and Quandre Diggs are just a few players to be added to "watch lists".