rimingtontrophy.com

NEW YORK, Feb. 7 – Winners of the four 2005 Dave Rimington awards for the outstanding center in NCAA Division 1-AA, II and III and the NAIA were announced today by the sponsoring Boomer Esiason Foundation.

Montana has two honorees, Jeff Bolton, the Division 1-AA recipient from Montana
State’s Bozeman campus, and Kyle Baker of the NAIA’s Carroll College in Helena.

Bolton was a three-year starter whose senior season ended with first-team
All-American recognition by the Associated Press, National Football Gazette and
Walter Camp Foundation. Because of his sure-handed snapping, knockdown blocking, height and weight numbers (6-4, 302), Bolton is expected to be selected in the early rounds of the upcoming NFL draft.

Baker (6-1, 265) was an athletic and academic All-American in 2004 and ’05. In
the four years he lettered, Carroll won national championships with an overall
53-4 record. Baker started in all but one of those 57 games.

In the order listed, the Division II and III winners are Lance Ancar of North
Alabama in Florence, and Damien Ciecwisz of Delaware Valley College in
Doylestown, Pa.

A National Football Gazette All-American, Ancar (6-1, 280) is a three-time All
Gulf South Conference center and member of two Daktronics All-South Region
squads.

Ciecwisz (6-0, 260) captained a team that earned the Middle Atlantic Conference
title with its 10-0 record. A starter in 47 games over a four-year period, he is
a National Football Gazette and D3 football.com All-American.

Named after Nebraska’s College Football Hall of Fame center, winners of the
Rimington awards are selected by Don Hansen, founder and publisher of the
National Weekly Football Gazette. Rimington began presenting them in 2003, three years after Esiason’s foundation created the Rimington Trophy for Division 1-A’s premier center.

The 1-A recipient is the consensus All-America center on teams that are compiled
by the Walter Camp Foundation, American Football Coaches Association, the
Sporting News, and Football Writers Association of America. Its 2005 awardee was Minnesota’s Greg Eslinger, who received the trophy at a testimonial banquet in Lincoln, Neb., on Jan. 7.

In 1993, when his two-year-old son, Gunnar, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis,
Esiason, a dynamic NFL quarterback from 1984 thru ’97, launched the BEF to raise funds for the treatment and research of that genetic disease.