Around Campus

UT Sweeps 2004-05 Big 12 Athlete of the Year Awards with Derrick Johnson and Cat Osterman Announced as Winners

Last month, the Big 12 Conference announced Longhorn All-America standouts Cat Osterman (softball) and Derrick Johnson (football) as this year’s Big 12 Conference Athletes of the Year. Osterman earned the honor for the second time in three years. Nominees are submitted by each Big 12 institution and selected by a media voting panel based on 2004-05 athletic performance, academic achievement and citizenship.

Osterman, a native of Houston, was the consensus National Softball Player of the Year and led the Longhorns to a third place finish at the 2005 Women’s College World Series. Johnson, a native of Waco, was the 2004 Nagurski Trophy recipient as the nation’s top defensive player and the 2004 Butkus Award honoree as college football’s top linebacker.

In the nine years of the Big 12 Athlete of the Year awards, six of the female recipients and two male award winners have been from UT. Texas is the only school to sweep the annual Big 12 Female and Male Athletes of the Year honors, and has done that twice – this year and also in 1999 when Ricky Williams (football) and Suziann Reid (track and field) earned both awards.

For her career, Osterman is 98-21 overall with an earned run average of 0.54. She has amassed 1,635 strikeouts, the third-highest total in NCAA history, and enters her senior year just 138 strikeouts shy of the NCAA record for career strikeouts. A psychology major, Osterman has been named to the All-Big 12 Academic Team twice and to the Big 12 Commissioner’s Honor Roll four times.

Johnson was selected with the 15th overall pick in the 2005 NFL Draft by the Kansas City Chiefs. Johnson finished 12th in this past year’s Heisman Trophy balloting and was the top defensive vote getter for that prestigious award. Texas’ co-captain and co-MVP received the Texas Exes Leadership Award last spring at UT Men’s Academic Awards banquet, an honor that recognizes the student-athlete that best exemplifies leadership in the community and on the campus. He is a youth and community studies major who was listed on UT’s Athletics Director’s Academic Honor Roll in the Spring of 2004.

He finished his collegiate career with 458 tackles (third on UT’s career list) and 281 of those solos (fourth on UT’s career list). His 65 tackles for loss are a school record while his nine career interceptions are tops among linebackers in UT history.