Jeff Hunter ’96

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It is April Fool’s Day in the Pacific Northwest, but the weather is no joke.

This is genuine Seattle weather. The kind that authenticates every cliché you’ve ever heard when it comes the Emerald City — wet, gray, cold, rainy. It’s all on display on an afternoon when one’s windshield wipers need to be cranked up full bore if you want to catch a hazy glimpse of the Space Needle from Interstate 5.

Nearly 14 years ago, the most accomplished football player to come out of Utah State since Merlin Olsen first arrived here in northwestern Washington after being selected by the Seahawks in the second round of the NFL Draft. And while Bobby Wagner has played in a couple of other cities during his 14-year career, the All-Pro middle linebacker continues to spend the majority of his offseasons living amongst the lush landscape of the Seattle area.

The home of the Seahawks’ headquarters and training facility sits about 15 miles southeast of downtown along the shores of Lake Washington. And, in advance of his Commencement speech on April 29, myself and three other representatives of Utah State University have converged near there to interview and photograph the former Aggie.

We have commandeered a small meeting room named after Washington state’s highest peaks — Rainier, Baker, Adams — to accommodate an on-camera interview with Wagner about his personal highpoints. But time is short, leaving little time for small talk before settling him into a well-lit position to begin the interview.

While my initial plan called for a relatively chronological flow to my questions, that’s quickly abandoned when someone makes mention of Wagner’s most recent accolade — the 2025 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award. Given out at the conclusion of the annual NFL Honors event to an outstanding player for their on-field performance, philanthropic efforts, character, and leadership. Wagner had previously been nominated for the award three other times.

But unlike previous years, Wagner says he didn’t receive any notice that he was at least a finalist, so he really didn’t give any thought to putting together an acceptance speech for the Feb. 6, ceremony in San Francisco.

“I wasn’t even going to go, but I had some really good people pushing me to go,” he admits. “So, I went with the intention of just having fun and just being around my peers. And honestly, I was all the way in the back, and they were like trying to rush me to my seat. It was at that point I started thinking, ‘OK, I probably need to figure something out.’”

What came out of Wagner’s mouth after the announcement of his win, was extremely emotional and from the heart. Wearing a black tuxedo, the Southern California native spoke extensively about his late mother, Phenia Mae Wagner, who passed away in May 2009, shortly after the conclusion of his freshman year at Utah State.

But during his nearly four-minute-long speech, Wagner made a point of celebrating his father, who also goes by Bobby.

“I want to thank my family. I’m truly grateful for the love and support. I’m going to talk about my mom a lot, but before I do that, I want to talk [about] my dad, because I feel like a lot of the times, you know, when my mom passed, that was the person that they asked about the most, because they wanted to know how I was dealing with it. And my dad was right there and helping me out a lot, and he was kind of the silent person in my corner that doesn’t get the love that he always deserves. So, I want to take this time to thank him, too.

“I didn’t realize how hard it was to be a father until I got two kids of my own, and I realized there’s a lot of work that goes unseen, a lot of sacrifices that they make, a lot of time spent away trying to provide for a family. And it made me appreciate the job that he did.”

When asked about his “off the cuff” oratory a couple of months later, Wagner says “it was perfect for the moment.” He explains that he wanted to acknowledge the influence of his father, who still lives in California, because when doing stories on him, the media tends to focus on Phenia, who passed away of a heart attack at the age of 47 a few months after suffering a stroke.

“The constant question I’ve gotten is, ‘How did you deal with it?’ And it almost painted a picture that my dad wasn’t in the picture,” Wagner says. “I think it got to a point where somebody asked me when I lost both parents, so I thought it was important to make sure he got his flowers on that.

“… I think when I was a kid, I didn’t appreciate or understand the hard work that he was doing, waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning, sitting in traffic, going to work, coming back home, and providing for a family.

“And mom,” adds Wagner, who has two older sisters and a younger brother, “she was figuring out how to balance all of us.”

AN OFFER HE CAN’T REFUSE

As rain pelts the windows behind him, I recall a Bobby Wagner moment from about 15 years earlier. While standing on the eastern sideline at Romney Stadium taking photographs during an Aggie football game, I remember looking out on the field at the 6-foot-1, 232-pound linebacker wearing No. 9 and thinking, He’s going to play in the NFL.

Since that moment likely came in the middle of Wagner’s junior or senior season, I certainly wasn’t the only person thinking that by that time. After leading the Western Athletic Conference and finishing tied for seventh amongst all FBS players by averaging 11.1 tackles per game in 2010, Wagner was named the WAC Defensive Player of the Year in 2011 after compiling 147 tackles, four sacks and two interceptions in 13 games.

But at that time, there weren’t a whole lot of Aggies who had spent time in the NFL since I’d arrived at Utah State in the early ’90s. Just having someone from USU get drafted and/or spend a season or two as a backup on a professional football roster was enough reason for celebration. Now a decade and a half later, here was that same man — a couple months shy of his 36th birthday — gearing up to break one of the NFL’s most notable defensive records.

Somehow, Wagner ended the 2025 season with exactly 2,000 combined career tackles, leaving him third on the all-time list behind London Fletcher (2,039) and Ray Lewis (2,059). At the time of our interview, Wagner was an unrestricted free agent after playing the previous two seasons with the Washington Commanders, but all indications are that he will sign on somewhere to play a 15th season.

But even if he were to retire this offseason, Wagner, who won the Super Bowl in 2014 as an integral part of Seahawks famous “Legion of Boom” defense, certainly appears destined to don a gold jacket at the Pro Football Hall of Fame sometime in the next decade. And that is a truly remarkable thought for an athlete who fancied himself as a future NBA star in high school, and whose lone football scholarship offer came from Utah State.

“I thought I was going to be 6-foot-7, and I was going to be the next Kobe Bryant,” Wagner says with a slight grin. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

Wagner, who was raised in the City of Inglewood before his family moved north to the “Inland Empire” when he was 8 years old, was a solid basketball player at Colony High School in Ontario. Primarily a forward, there’s a much-discussed photograph of Wagner boxing out Kawhi Leonard, now a two-time NBA champion, when Leonard was a young star at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in nearby Riverside. But Wagner was a couple inches short of 6 feet tall at the time of that photograph and was coming to the realization that professional basketball likely wasn’t in his future.

Enter Colony High football coach Anthony Rice.

“Coach Rice came into the gym my junior year, and we had a bunch of football players that were still playing basketball,” Wagner recalls. “He was like, ‘You know, I really think that I can help get you to college,’ and I knew my mom really wanted me to go to college. And so as soon as he told my mom that, she was sold because he basically guaranteed that I was going to go to college.”

Still relatively undersized and thin for football at the time, Wagner played some tight end for the Titans, but he really came to enjoy the role of an inside linebacker.

“I learned very quickly that if you’re not the running back or quarterback, you’re not getting the ball,” he notes. “You can’t really control how much you get the ball. But as a linebacker, I was in the middle, so I could be around everything. So, I just gravitated towards that because I wanted to be in the middle. And then as I got to college and into the pros, I realized how important the linebacker was in their role. They’re almost a quarterback for the defense.”

After compiling close to 100 tackles as a junior, Wagner racked up 125 total tackles, including four sacks, during his senior year at Colony. But despite Rice campaigning on his behalf, Wagner received very little attention from Division I football programs until Danilo Robinson took notice. An Aggie defensive end from 1993 to ’96, Robinson was a member of Brent Guy’s coaching staff in the mid-2000s and a native of Southern California.

Wagner ended up on Robinson’s recruiting radar, which led to a slightly awkward initial interaction.

“I had never even heard of Utah,” Wagner admits. “I didn’t travel. In my mind, it was just California, San Diego, and Vegas. That was it.”

Nonetheless, Robinson managed to talk Wagner into traveling all the way to Logan for a recruiting visit with his mother. On the plus side, the Wagners attended the Aggie basketball game when all-time leading scorer Jaycee Carroll surpassed 2,000 points for his career with a 32-point performance against Utah Valley. But on the negative side, Cache Valley was cold and snowy in December 2007.

“I had never seen snow before. My only experience with snow before then was in cartoons, and they’re always running on top of the snow,” Wagner says. “So, I tried to do like they do in cartoons, and I fell in the snow because it was like six feet deep, and it got into my pants.

“… I wasn’t a fan of the cold. I wasn’t a fan of the snow. And I wasn’t a fan of being that far from my family at the time.”

Unfortunately for Wagner, Guy offered him a scholarship during that visit. And Phenia made it clear that despite the snow, and the possibility that a college closer to home might still come through with a late offer, he was going to accept the opportunity given to him by the Aggies.

“It was my mom,” Wagner acknowledges. “She told me to take the offer or not come home.”

STAYING POWER

Ideally, listening to Bobby Wagner share the story of his early days as an Aggie would come with more smiles. But it was tough. Really tough.

If being so far from home and his beloved mother wasn’t a big enough challenge, Utah State had a brutal season in 2008. The Aggies went 3–9, leading to Guy’s dismissal after winning just eight games in four seasons.

Wagner played in 11 games and made nine starts during his freshman year, but he says he was “90% transferring, for sure,” after the season ended.

Phenia encouraged him to stay and continue his career at Utah State, but after she suffered a stroke while dealing with an illness, he understandably started to look elsewhere once again.

“With my mom’s serious situation, I just wanted to move closer, so I tried to get back to a California school,” Wagner says. “But again, my mom was like, ‘Nah. Stay. You’re where you’re supposed to be.’ So, I didn’t transfer.

“I would have transferred for sure had she not said, ‘Stay.’ But I ended up staying and having a great time.”

A big part of that “great time” came courtesy of USU’s new head football coach. Gary Andersen, who joined Wagner in the Utah State Athletics Hall of Fame last fall, was hired on Dec. 4, 2008, and was determined to change the culture of the Aggie football program as quickly as possible. He clearly recognized something special in Wagner, who went from being deeply concerned over the health of his mother, to being absolutely devastated when she passed away on May 29, 2009.

“He cared,” Wagner says of Andersen. “… I remember the first conversation with him. He said, ‘Look, not everybody will be treated the same, but you will be treated fair. And I respected that. … He treated everybody fair and clear, and he took the time to figure out what our goals and aspirations were.

“And when I told him I wanted to make it to the league, he coached me that way. … He was a lot harder on me because he knew where I wanted to get to, and we clicked in that moment.”

Wagner also credits assistant coach Kevin Clune, who coached USU’s linebackers during Andersen’s tenure, as a “big, huge influence during that time, too, because he was the one I spent the majority of my time with after my mom passed, watching film and spending many hours talking about life.”

Playing with a broken heart during his sophomore year, Wagner started every game and finished the season with two interceptions and a team-high 115 tackles. And even though the Aggies went 4–8 during Andersen’s first two seasons, it was abundantly clear he was building something. Utah State finally broke through during Wagner’s senior season in 2011, finishing 7–6 to record the Aggies’ first winning record in 15 years.

And in the middle of that pivotal season came a very critical performance on the island of Oahu that is regarded as the “turning point” of the Aggie football program. After coming into the season with relatively high hopes, Utah State opened the 2011 campaign with a 2–5 record and found itself trailing Hawaii, 28–7 at halftime, on Nov. 5. To make matters worse, starting quarterback Chuckie Keeton was lost for the rest of the game after suffering a scary neck injury late in the second quarter.

With backup QB Adam Kennedy in, things certainly looked grim. Most Aggie fans fully expected to wake up the next morning to find their team was 2–6. But inside the Utah State locker room, Wagner found himself a little louder and more vocal than usual.

“It was colorful,” Wagner says with a smile when asked if he remembers what he said that night in Hawaii. “I don’t remember what I said exactly, but it was colorful, for sure.”

Wagner recalls that prior to facing the Rainbow Warriors, the Aggies held a players-only meeting where they talked about “all of the things that we wanted to do better.” But come game time, he says he became frustrated that wasn’t happening.

“There was a lot of stuff going on in there with coaches and players, and I finally got up and said, ‘Everybody just stop talking. We’re talking too much. All the talking and the yelling needs to stop, and you need to just do,’” Wagner recalls. “‘I don’t know what’s going to happen in this game. We may lose this game. But we need to do and stop talking. There’s no motivational speech that’s going to bring us back in this game. Stop talking and start doing and see what happens.’

“And we started doing.”

The Aggies rallied back to outscore Hawaii, 28–3, in the second half. A touchdown by junior running back Robert Turbin with 14 seconds left ended up being the difference in the gritty, 35–31 victory.

Buoyed by that unexpected comeback, they played the rest of the season with much more confidence, winning five straight games to secure their first bowl game bid since 1997. Utah State ended up suffering a brutal 24–23 loss to Ohio in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, but the 2011 season helped set the stage for an historic 2012 campaign that resulted in an 11–2 record, a bowl victory, and a Top 25 ranking.

SUSTAINED DOMINANCE

Prior to our rendezvous near Seattle, my last in-person interview with Wagner came following that loss to Ohio at Bronco Stadium in Boise. But more memorable to me was a photo I took that night of Wagner and Turbin, standing in the shadows at the edge of the dais during Gary Andersen’s postgame press conference.

In that moment, Turbin was staring up at the ceiling while leaning against a concrete pillar, and Wagner was facing the opposite direction, forlornly looking out the window towards BSU’s blue turf field with moist eyes. Both wearing Aggie jerseys for the final time, the pain of the difficult loss to the Bobcats was very evident in both of their faces.

Two years later, I mentally juxtaposed that moment with images I saw from East Rutherford, New Jersey, on Feb. 2, 2014, after the Seahawks’ 43–8 humbling of the favored Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. There are on the field at MetLife Stadium were Wagner and Turbin — a fourth-round selection of the Seahawks in the 2012 NFL Draft — celebrating Seattle’s first-ever Super Bowl victory as professional football players.

“I got to play with some really, really cool people,” Wagner says of his early years in Seattle. “I don’t think I could have played with better men. … All of those guys were really good at football, which I respected. But they were really good at other things off the field, and they made me try and figure out what my passion was.”

Wagner goes on to mention the names of nearly a dozen other Seattle gridiron legends like Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, Earl Thomas, Doug Baldwin and Russell Wilson that he shared the locker room with during the Seahawks’ remarkable run under head coach Pete Carroll, who famously admitted that he made a huge mistake by not recruiting the future All-Pro linebacker when he was the coach at USC.

But after 10 incredibly consistent seasons in Seattle wearing No. 54, Wagner was stunned when the Seahawks suddenly released him in March 2022. That led to him returning to Southern California and signing with the Rams, the team he had anticipated being drafted by in 2012 when the franchise was still based in St. Louis

“The Rams were calling me a lot before the draft,” says Wagner, who coincidentally played the 2022 season at SoFi Stadium, which sits just a few blocks south of Inglewood Park Cemetery, where Phenia is buried. “But I was flying all over the place meeting with teams, and by the time I got to Seattle, I was burnt out. That was my last visit and my worst visit. I don’t think it could have went any worse. I thought, ‘There’s no way that team is going to draft me.’

“… And during the draft, I told my family I was going to be a Ram. And just before Seattle was about to pick (at No. 47), I was getting up to go to the bathroom when I got a phone call from a 425 number. I only answered it because the area code was so close to Utah’s 435, then I realized it was Seattle.”

After spending one season in Los Angeles wearing No. 45, Wagner returned to Seattle in 2023 and led the NFL in total tackles with 183. But that reunion also lasted just one season, leading him to spend the next two years playing for former Seahawks’ defensive coordinator Dan Quinn and the Washington Commanders.

While the Commanders’ 2025 season was a bit of a disappointment in The District, Wagner still finished fifth in the NFL in total tackles with 162, and he came up with two interceptions to bring his career total to 15. At the age of 35, he missed only seven defensive snaps the entire season.

“He’s the best tackler I’ve coached,” Quinn said of Wagner after his veteran linebacker reached the 2,000-milestone in Washington’s final game of the 2025 season. “I looked at the stat line at the half, and I was, ‘OK, let’s split some. Let’s get some more tackles.’ But in true Wags fashion, he will find a way. He’s remarkable in so many ways.”

Now just 60 tackles away from surpassing Ray Lewis and setting a new NFL record, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Wagner’s longevity and consistency. A first-team All-Pro selection six times, Wagner, his former teammate Russell Wilson (currently with the New York Giants), and Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Kirk Cousins are some of just a handful of players selected in the 2012 draft likely to still be playing in the NFL in 2026.

“Yeah, it’s a blessing,” says Wagner, who has only missed 10 regular-season games in 14 years, and zero the past four seasons. “I think I had some really good people to look up to growing up. Obviously, Ray Lewis, Kobe Bryant, and, later on, LeBron James. Guys who were able to do it for a long time because they took care of their bodies.”

Wagner, who has attributed his durability to proper nutrition, hot yoga, Pilates, and the use of a hyperbolic chamber, reached out to London Fletcher in 2019 and asked him advice on how to lengthen his professional career. Ironically, Wagner is now 33 combined tackles away from bumping Fletcher down to second on the all-time list, and Fletcher, who now works for the Commanders, was in the locker room to help Wagner celebrate notching his 2,000th career tackle.

“We see that 2,000-tackle number, but it represents so much more,” Fletcher said afterwards. “That milestone is a lot, but it’s much more when you dig deep into it because you have to have sustained dominance. You have to have a commitment to excellence and do this over and over again, year after year.”

A BLESSING TO SOMEONE ELSE

Less than a mile away from our location sits a Crumbl cookie store. And while the façade looks relatively similar to other Crumbl franchises around the country, in the lower-right corner of the front windows are painted three footballs and a No. 1 foam finger emblazoned with a “54” painted in Seahawks’ colors.

Opened in September 2024, this Crumbl store is just a small part of Bobby Wagner’s plan for “sustained dominance” — on the field and off.

A business entrepreneurship major while at Utah State, he also completed an MBA through Howard University in December 2025. Wagner, who says he’s always been inspired by former athletes-turned-successful businessmen like Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson, is also part owner of the Seattle Storm WNBA franchise and a partner in a Seattle-based venture capital firm, among other business enterprises.

A strong believer in networking, Wagner says he was inspired to pursue USU connections after hearing his Seahawks teammates, Richard Sherman and Doug Baldwin, brag about the connections they had made through their alma mater, Stanford. That quickly led to him heading south to Portland to visit with Charlie Denson, a fellow Utah State football alum, who was then serving as the president of the NIKE Brand.

“I somehow got his number, told him I was in business, and then drove down there and introduced myself,” Wagner says of Denson, who was USU’s Commencement speaker in 2013. “We’ve had a really beautiful friendship, and he’s opened and unlocked a lot of doors for me. So, the power of networking and not being afraid to fail is real.”

Wagner, who has expressed a desire to someday serve as the commissioner of the NFL, fired his agent and negotiated his own three-year, $54 million contract with the Seahawks in 2019. He says that belief in himself as both a football player and an entrepreneur is partially attributable to his interactions at Utah State with longtime kinesiology professor Rich Gordin, who specializes in sports psychology.

“I still talk to him to this day,” Wagner says of Gordin.

That combination of success in both business and pro football — where Wagner has made an estimated $118 million as a player — also helped create more opportunities for Wagner to develop his philanthropic pursuits. He started by hosting youth football camps in Ontario, then moved onto providing Thanksgiving meals for the homeless and picking up the tab at grocery stores for families in need at Christmastime in the Seattle area.

Wagner has also emerged as a huge supporter of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and in honor of his late mother, in 2022 he announced the creation of the Phenia Mae Fund, which has partnered with hospitals in Los Angeles, Ontario, Seattle and Washington D.C. to assist stroke patients and promote stroke education. During his return season to Seattle in 2023, he even developed a comic book and animated short film entitled FAST54 that was designed to help teach people how to recognize the signs of a stroke.

“I just want to give back,” Wagner says of his philanthropic efforts. “I was blessed, and I try to be a blessing to somebody else.”

Wagner’s impact will certainly continue to be felt at Utah State University, where it was announced on April 27, that his No. 9 will be retired by the Aggie football team sometime this fall. The only other USU players to have their numbers retired are Merlin Olsen (No. 71) and Elmer “Bear” Ward (No. 35).

“Bobby exemplifies what it means to be an Aggie, and this honor is long overdue,” USU athletic director Cameron Walker says. “We are excited to recognize his achievements in a Utah State uniform and all he has accomplished in the NFL and in his community. Retiring his number and displaying it on the side of our press box for current and future Aggies to see is a well-deserved honor to celebrate an amazing football career and a remarkable person.”

It will be another full-circle moment for Wagner, who was enshrined in the Utah State Athletics Hall of Fame in 2022, at the same time as his former Seahawk teammate Turbin, and Jaycee Carroll. As he contemplates what he wants to say to USU graduates during his Commencement speech, the father of two looks around the meeting room cluttered with lights and cameras and declares: “If it wasn’t for Utah State, none of this would be possible. I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation, and I wouldn’t be speaking in front of these people. I had a dream, and the dream would have stopped had Utah State not given me an opportunity. So, I am forever and always grateful for the opportunity to be a part of Utah State.”