By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In February, Super Bowl LX matched two football teams whose offensive lines each included a University of Virginia alumnus.
Seattle’s Olusegun Oluwatimi and New England’s Morgan Moses didn’t overlap on Grounds, but they’ve trained together in the offseason. They’re friends, and the Seahawks’ 29-13 win over the Patriots in Santa Clara, Calif., didn’t change that.
“I was able to catch up with him right after the game,” Oluwatimi said. “It’s cool how long he’s been playing and how he still has the fire to play more.”
Moses, who starred for head coach Mike London at UVA, entered the NFL in 2014. Oluwatimi has much less professional experience—he joined the Seahawks in 2023—but he’s hoping to have a lengthy NFL career too.
“I think I still got some more years left in the game,” Oluwatimi said.
In a span of about a decade, Oluwatimi went from unheralded recruit to Super Bowl champion. Coming out of DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Md., he passed on an opportunity to enroll at UVA as a preferred walk-on.
Instead, he accepted an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy. But after a year at Air Force, where he redshirted, Oluwatimi transferred to Virginia in the summer of 2018 and joined head coach Bronco Mendenhall’s program as a walk-on.
Under the NCAA transfer rules then in place, Oluwatimi had to sit out the 2018 season. Less than a year later, he was awarded a scholarship, and Oluwatimi went on to reward Mendenhall’s belief in him.
Oluwatimi started 13 of 14 games at center in 2019, all 10 in 2020 and all 12 in 2021. He was a second-team All-American in ’21 and was one of three finalists for the Rimington Award, given annually to the top center in college football.
He didn’t have a great experience at Air Force, and Oluwatimi acknowledges that such an illustrious college career did not seem like a foregone conclusion when he arrived in Charlottesville.
“If I had to look back, I probably wouldn't have envisioned that seven years later or eight years later I’d be here,” Oluwatimi said. “I have a lot of confidence in myself and my abilities and the person that I am, but when you go through certain things, it does, I don't want to say knock your confidence, but it does make you doubt, and there were times when I doubted.
“But when I got to Virginia and got on the field, I was like, ‘Man, I can hang. ‘And then my role increased and I became a leader there and things of that nature. I always thought I had the ability to play in the NFL. It was just a question of would I get the opportunity, would things kind of fall my way? And luckily they did.”
The highlight of his Cavalier career, Oluwatimi said, was the 2019 season. UVA defeated Virginia Tech for the first time since 2003, captured the ACC’s Coastal Division for the first time, and played in the ACC championship game and the Orange Bowl.
“Still to this day, those are some of my fondest memories,” said Oluwatimi, who lived with teammates Richard Burney and Eli Hanback that year. “It was a special team.”
He’s still close with many of his former UVA teammates, including Burney, Hanback, Chris Glaser, Terrell Jana, Nathaniel Beal III, Nick Jackson and Josh Ahern. They keep in touch with group chats and see each other whenever possible.
A few days after the end of the 2021 regular season, Mendenhall unexpectedly resigned at UVA. Oluwatimi, who had a year of eligibility remaining, entered the transfer portal and landed at the University of Michigan, where he played in 2022. But he looks back fondly on his time in Charlottesville.
“It was awesome,” said Oluwatimi, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at Virginia. “I accomplished a lot there. I met some of my closest friends there. Really, all my closest friends, I would say, other than family, I played with at UVA.”
Glaser, Jana and Beal stood at his June 2024 wedding to Naomi Morrison, a former gymnast whom he met at Michigan. In the offseason, Oluwatimi and his wife live in Rockville, Md., not far from where he grew up in the Washington, D.C., area..
At Michigan, he closed his college career with a fabulous final season. A consensus All-American, Oluwatimi received not only the Rimington Award but the Outland Trophy, given annually to the nation’s top interior lineman, and helped the Wolverines advance to the College Football Playoff.