How Pete Carroll whiffed, how a trick in a SoCal bar extended Bobby Wagner’s football life
A perennial All-Pro, arguably the best middle linebacker of his NFL generation, a likely future Pro Football Hall of Famer, got his only college scholarship offer because of bar trick by his high school coach.
“My coach basically fabricated” his recruitment, Bobby Wagner said.
Wagner didn’t begin playing football until his junior year at Colony High School in Ontario, California. He had been basketball player first, and foremost. The huge Los Angeles Lakers fan, now 31, still fancies himself as potentially NBA-caliber in hoops.
But Wagner was under 6 feet tall as junior in high school.
“I saw everybody growing this way,” the now-6-foot Wagner said Wednesday, raising his hand above his head, “and I was kind of bulking up.
“I knew height wasn’t going to be my strong suit, so I chose a sport that height didn’t necessarily matter.”
Wagner became a fast linebacker and tight end. But after his senior season of 2007 at Colony High he was a shade under 5-10, maybe 190 pounds. He had zero scholarship offers. He thought he was headed to a junior college, maybe to play with future Seahawks teammate Bruce Irvin at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California, 16 miles west of Wagner’s hometown.
When Wagner was a high school senior, then-Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh came to the Inland Empire on a recruiting trip. So did a member of Utah State’s coaching staff. Harbaugh and the Utah State coach happened to be in the same bar-restaurant in the Ontario area. Wagner’s coach at Colony saw them there.
The coach had a lot at stake, personally. Two years earlier, he had promised Phenia Wagner, Bobby’s mother, he would get her son a college scholarship if he ditched basketball and played for his Colony High football team.
With no offers coming and with Harbaugh and the Utah State staffer inside the same establishment near his school, coach Anthony Rice wasn’t about to let down Mama Wagner. He made a bold, shrewd move.
It got Wagner to major college football, to the Seahawks as a second-round draft choice in 2012 and now, a $54 million Super Bowl champion and the NFL’s highest-paid middle linebacker.
“He walked over to Jim Harbaugh and said, ‘We’ve got this linebacker. You should look at him,’” Wagner said.
“Jim said, ‘No.’
“Then he went from Jim Harbaugh to Utah State and said, ‘Hey, that guy over there is going to offer him if you don’t.’
“So, they offered me. I wasn’t going to accept it and then I was forced to accept it.
“That’s how I ended up at Utah State.”
After his freshman year into Utah State, his mom suffered a stroke. Wagner wanted to leave Logan, Utah, and go to school closer to Mom.
“She told me to stay,” he said. “So I stayed.”
Phenia Wagner died months later, of a heart attack. She was 47.
Wagner has dedicated his career and his life outside of football of entrepreneurship to his mother.
“The biggest thing I think she’d be proud of is the man that I am off the field, more so on the field,” Wagner said in December. “She’s always been like my big supporter.
“She’s always the loudest person at the games. She was always the one that I had to look at — as a son, you look into the stands and you kind of like had to tell her, ‘Can you sit down a little bit?’ She was always that person.
“The biggest thing that I think she would be, I guess, most proud of is the humility, is the consistency. Being the same person that I have always been.
“I’ve grown as a person. But what I do off the field, I think she’d be most proud of.”
Carroll, too
Pete Carroll was on that same recruiting trail as Harbaugh and the Utah State coach through San Bernardino County in the winter of 2007-08. Carroll had rebuilt USC into a dynasty that decade. He went to Colony High School that winter to recruit...not Wagner.
“He was recruiting was my brother basically. He lived down the street,” Wagner said. “I remember him coming. I remember seeing him walk in and I remember him walking right past me to Omar (Bolden).”
Bolden had just rushed for 2,003 yards as a senior teammate of Wagner’s at Colony. Bolden was also a star defensive back. He was the California Interscholastic Federation Central Division Most Valuable Player and the Inland Valley Player of the Year after leading Colony to its first CIF title in 2006.
Bolden didn’t sign with Carroll and USC. He played for Arizona State. He was a fourth-round pick by Denver in 2012 and played four seasons for the Broncos, his last in 2015.
All Carroll got on that trip to Ontario in early 2008 was sun. He and USC lost out on Bolden and Wagner.
Carroll said he doesn’t remember recruiting Bolden.
But he remembers Wagner. Wagner won’t let him forget it.
It’s been that way since the day Carroll drafted Wagner for Seattle nine years ago. He’s brought it up to the coach, regularly.
“Yes, he has,” Carroll said.
“He was about 190 (pounds) then. I missed him. I screwed that up. I don’t remember why we missed Bobby, but he was a little undersized and I think he may have come to one of our camps and didn’t see him there, which is a mistake on our part.”
Sunday in Seattle’s 2021 opener at Indianapolis, Wagner will begin his 10th season as Carroll’s middle man and signal caller for the Seahawks’ defense. The team’s co-captain with fellow franchise cornerstone Russell Wilson, Wagner has earned $71.3 million in his NFL career. When the $54 million contract he negotiated himself with the Seahawks in 2019, without an agent, expires following the 2022 season, Wagner will have earned $103.3 million.
Not bad for a guy who only got to play major college football because of a slick bar trick, whose eventual NFL coach ignored him 13 years ago.
“I went to Utah (State), and I thought about it every time I played a California school. I had to go all the way to the cold,” Wagner said. “That was the first thing I said to him (on the Seahawks).
“Better late than never, I guess.”
