Parker Titsworth already overcame the odds to become one of the most decorated players in Ohio history. Now he aims to do the same while pursuing his NFL dreams.
Parker Titsworth’s blood was essentially laced with pigskin.
Like thousands of kids across the country, football was an essential part of his upbringing. On Saturdays and Sundays, he’d be mesmerized by the athletic feats that graced his television. Then when the games ended, he ran outside to emulate what he just witnessed. A football always accompanied his hands as a kid which led to his parents signing him up for flag football. By third grade, Titsworth upgraded to tackle football in a Pop Warner league in Avon, Ohio.
Titsworth’s football dream was evident to all around him, as he spent weekends pushing a homemade sled of bricks that his dad crafted up and down the driveway. As he aged, he’d sneak onto the high school football practice field and perfect the defensive lineman moves he learned from camps.
Former Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle and two-time Super Bowl champion Chris Hoke, whose son Cade played alongside Titsworth at North Allegheny High School in the Pittsburgh area, once claimed he never saw a high school kid work as hard at a sport as Titsworth — an impressive statement from someone who witnessed plenty of football throughout their life.
But what happens when you pour so much love into football, but the game doesn’t love you back? Titsworth could train to become as fast as he wanted, as strong as he desired, but two things he couldn’t alter were his height and wingspan — two essential attributes to thrive at the sport.
“He wanted to be great in high school,” Parker’s father Todd Titsworth said. “He knew he had to be because he wasn’t the biggest guy. He wanted to play college and get himself into the NFL. I knew that all he had to do was get in front of a coach and they would see the passion he had for the game and the confidence he had in himself. I knew he was gonna play college football, whether it was gonna be FCS or FBS. All he had to do was get there.”
Getting there was the problem, and not just due to a lack of size.
Parker Titsworth essentially played four games his entire high school career, so there was minimal tape to work with. As a junior at North Allegheny, he played a quarter in the final game of the season and just three plays in the playoffs. His senior campaign started off substantially stronger, but in the midst of a dominant performance against Central Catholic, an opposing player dove at Titsworth’s ankle on the first play of the second half, and the resulting high ankle sprain sidelined him until the final game of the regular season. He returned in time for the postseason but then suffered another injury less than one half into the first playoff game.
Coaches often say the best ability is availability, and Titsworth’s lack of availability looked to be the endgame of a football life that started so pure and passionately from the time he could walk.
“He was worried,” Todd Titsworth said. “He only played in four games and thought his dreams were done. I told him, ‘You played well enough in your four games and you’ve got enough film, so if we can get that out to coaches, they can see the type of ball player you are.’”
Unable to escape injury and draw attention from college coaches, Parker took recruiting into his own hands despite lacking connections.
His dad brainstormed the idea of attending camps and handing out business cards to attending coaches. However, things went awry at an Ohio State camp on June 6, 2017 when Titsworth suffered a lateral meniscus injury while attempting Reggie White’s signature hump move. This knee injury hindered his junior year availability in high school, adding another roadblock to the attempt at self-recruiting.
Parker attempted other methods of recruitment, utilizing Twitter and email to mass distribute his limited, but productive senior year highlight tape. He carefully tweaked and tailored his messages to coaches from every school he was interested in, ranging from Penn State to MAC programs to Robert Morris, flooding their inboxes until he received closure. However, one school that was noticeably absent from Titsworth’s DMs was Ohio University.
A different connection brought the two parties together — a pairing which would forever alter both parties for the better. Todd Titsworth hired a recruiting services consultant, and this method ultimately proved more fruitful than the previous attempts.
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“This recruiting services guy reached out to Coach (Tim) Albin who at the time was the (Ohio) offensive coordinator and running backs coach, and he used some descriptive words — I didn’t see the email,” Parker Titsworth recalled. “Coach Albin liked what he saw in the email, then he reached out to me and gave me a call and said I was built like a center and moved like a running back.”
Coaches receive dozens of emails, DMs, texts, and calls from prospective recruits every day. Most don’t get opened or returned. Titsworth not only received a response from Albin in the form of a call, but in that call, the coach offered a preferred walk-on spot at Ohio. Amongst a sea of Division I FCS and Division II offers, this offer glistened like gold for Titsworth, whose primary goal was to crack an FBS roster.
But this offer had another unique feature compared to those FCS and Division II offers. Everyone else recruited Titsworth to play his primary position of defensive lineman. Albin wanted him to be a center, a position Titsworth hadn’t played since sophomore year of high school.
“For him to open up that email and like what he saw and choose to reach out to me, I couldn’t have gotten luckier,” Titsworth said. “I couldn’t be more thankful that it happened.”
Onboarding at Ohio was a significant milestone, yet he was far from satisfied. The newly-transitioned center was now equipped with an evident hunger for a scholarship.
“It was a pride thing,” Titsworth said. “When I was committed to it, I was gonna go earn it.”
From fifth-string to 3,358
The Wexford, Pennsylvania native traveled 200 miles from home to arrive in Athens, Ohio as a preferred walk-on. Immediately upon getting acquainted with his new home, a defining moment transpired when Titsworth learned the two digits that would become synonymous with his name over the next six years.
“Coach Cov (Jeremiah Covington) is the one that gave Parker his number,” Todd Titsworth said. “He saw his last name and said, ‘He’s getting 69.’ I remember Parker calling me and telling me he’s gonna be the laughingstock of college football: ‘Guess what number they gave me, Dad — 69,’ and I said, ‘That’s awesome. You have a number. You have a jersey. That means you’re playing. You’re representing Ohio football. You’re playing football.’ And he just embraced it after his first game he had.”
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The new No. 69 was introduced to No. 70 in the neighboring locker, the team’s starting center Nick Sink. Sink similarly experienced the walk-on life when starting at Ohio and quickly embraced Titsworth as his inquisitive understudy — realizing there was immense potential in the undersized freshman.
“As a senior or as an older guy who has gotten on the field and played, you want to help out these guys, but there is still a level of responsibility for them to come to you and ask if they don’t understand something,” Sink said. “His effort and his dedication to doing that — he asked me about everything. That mental load, he was able to pick it up quick because he was so eager to do so and studied countless hours.”
Titsworth was a fifth-string center, and the only commonality the two former walk-ons shared at the time was their position. But when the two first met, Sink held two titles Titsworth eventually wanted to achieve — starter and captain — and Sink had a courtside view to Titsworth’s chase for these titles.
“He was gritty,” Sink said. “He put effort into everything, whether it was nutrition or the weight room. When he got on campus, he couldn’t have been more than 260 pounds. His nutrition to play at the Division I level and his commitment to it was incredible. That’s what got him to the point where he is today, the effort he puts into everything.”
While Titsworth originally decided to progress himself through the depth chart by mastering the playbook, he could only go so far with this route. Months passed, the hourglass of the 2019 season exhausted, and Titsworth had an exit meeting scheduled with offensive line coach Allen Rudolph — who Titsworth still communicates with and seeks advice from on a frequent basis. But on that particular day, Rudolph uttered a statement that nearly shattered the center’s entire football future.
“I remember my first exit meeting after my freshman season like it was yesterday,” Titsworth said. “We looked each other in the eye. I asked about a scholarship and what I could do to earn one, and he said he’d rather hit or miss on a guy who’s 6’3” than 6’0”. At the time I was 260 pounds, and he said he’d rather hit or miss on a guy who’s 295 pounds rather than 260. I left that meeting shattered. I didn’t know what to do.”
Titsworth is typically his own harshest critic, so receiving an outside criticism that cut that deep was especially backbreaking. Disheartened and bereft of a direction, he consulted his family — the strongest and most consistent source of motivation in his life — at a time when motivation was a scarce resource.
Titsworth wasn’t growing any taller than 6’0”, but there were other physical attributes he could control. After the COVID-adjusted 2020 season where Ohio was limited to just three games, he made use of a squat rack, a bench press, creatine, and home-cooked meals to put on 45 pounds of weight.
“He wasn’t gonna settle,” said Todd Titsworth, remembering Parker’s reaction to the meeting. “He got pissed, he came home, he put on the weight, worked out hard, and when he got back to camp, nobody recognized him.”
After an offseason of grueling work and a productive fall camp, Titsworth was ready to attack his third year on campus, and his drive was evident to those around him. On Aug. 24, 2021 while prepping for a Week 1 battle vs. Syracuse, Titsworth received a call from Coach Albin, who replaced longtime frontman Frank Solich as Ohio’s head coach one month earlier. Just like that freshman exit meeting, it was another moment etched into Titsworth’s memory, but this time, there was a positive spin.
Titsworth was finally on scholarship.
“That call was life-changing,” Titsworth said. “That is something that will always be burned into my memory forever.”
The boxes of making an FBS roster and earning a scholarship were checked. Next in line involved becoming a starter, but Titsworth didn’t attain that status in the most desirable way.
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In a September 2021 contest against Northwestern, Sink suffered an ankle injury which thrust Titsworth into the center spot. What originated as an on-the-fly lineup adjustment eventually became a fixture of the Ohio offensive line for the next four seasons. Titsworth finally rose to the top of the depth chart, and when Sink returned from injury, Titsworth maintained the center position while his mentor adopted the role as a starting guard.
“He got thrown into the fire,” Sink said. “The opportunity came for him to get in a game, and he played really, really well. He didn’t blink an eye. And center’s a tough job especially in the offense that we run at Ohio. It’s a huge mental load to make sure everybody’s on the same page with all the different plays we have the possibility of running at the line, and for him to take care of that mental load, it was impressive. Then his play just got better year after year because the mental side came easier and he was able to play free.”
Sink subsequently graduated and the 2022 offseason signified the official passing of the torch from one former walk-on to the next. But everything changed on Feb. 22 when Titsworth tore his pectoral muscle, which typically involves a year-long recovery process. Although the center completed rehab in five-and-a-half months to suit up for fall camp, fighting the injury remained an uphill battle all year.
“I was not playing well,” Titsworth said. “I showed flashes, but I personally wasn’t happy with where my game was at. Outside of practice, I did extra work in my apartment complex. We had access to a weight room so I would do stuff to strengthen it and become more confident as a player. I started to catch my stride and settle in, and I thought my best performance was the toward the end of the season in the bowl game.”
The momentum from the 2022 Arizona Bowl win was enough to catapult Titsworth into a more successful 2023. And perhaps there was no greater difference between 2022 and 2023 than his performance against a certain non-conference opponent.
“Beating Iowa State was huge for me,” Titsworth said. “The year prior, I hadn’t played well in that game. I got pushed around in that game and I had something to prove in the following year in 2023. I played lights out, and that is the game I’d be willing to lean on if a coach asked, ‘How does Parker Titsworth play football?’ Look at the difference between 2022 Iowa State vs. the 2023 Iowa State game. That did so much for my mental. There was no better feeling. I was the captain for that game. Everything about that day, I remember it like it was yesterday.”
From that point onward, it was clear that Titsworth was one of the top linemen in the MAC. He finally secured his first All-MAC bid in 2024 while leading Ohio to its first-ever 11-win season. But his accolades and impact at the university far exceed one All-MAC selection. He ended his 6-year Ohio tenure with 50 consecutive starts and now stands as the Bobcats’ all-time leader with 3,358 snaps played.
He never transferred from the only FBS school that offered him a walk-on opportunity. He never considered wearing colors besides green and white. All he wanted was to bring an elusive championship to a program that starved over five decades for one.
Taking the lead on a 56-year project
From 2009 to 2020, Ohio never produced one losing season. The Bobcats were as consistent of a force in the MAC as possible, qualifying for bowls on an annual basis and winning their first five bowl games in program history during that timespan.
However, one number always floated around like a ghost in the facilities in Athens — 1968. Despite the consistent success and the frequent bowl wins, Ohio hadn’t mustered a MAC championship since 1968.
Titsworth, fresh off his scholarship offer, was eager to be apart of a transformative team to snap that streak in 2021. Rather than traverse the path to Detroit for a conference title, Ohio navigated different unforeseen territory that fateful year. In Albin’s first go-around taking over from Frank Solich, the Bobcats faltered to 3-9, heavily burdened by an early-season loss to an FCS program Duquesne.
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A 3-9 result was both a surprise and disappointment for the program, but it was clear that it was now a program in dire need of improvement. Without even opening a playbook, Parker’s father quickly recognized one aspect of the team that severely needed repair, and he tasked his son with solving it.
“Spring game, it was always a big thing that the offensive players got in fights with defensive players,” Todd Titsworth said. “I told Parker his freshman year, your challenge is to stop that. You’re never gonna be a championship team if the offense is fighting with the defense or vice versa. That’s gonna be your biggest challenge as a leader, get the offense and defense to come together and play as one unit. That’s how you win championships. You don’t win championships when you’re divided.”
After the 2021 season, as a scholarship player with three years of college under his belt, Parker made it his mission to eradicate any division within the team. It was natural instinct for the center, who spent the majority of his football life leading groups beyond the Xs and Os.
“He was a captain in high school,” Todd Titsworth said. “He’s been a captain of every football team he’s ever been apart of. In his Pop Warner stuff, he was a captain. He’s always been a leader. He’s got that aura about him that people are attracted to because he treats everybody fair.”
The three-year captain’s mission was soon accomplished in practices, and suddenly, the Ohio Bobcats operated as a cohesive football team heading into the 2022 campaign.
“The best part about it was it only got better,” Parker Titsworth said. “There was not a lot of inner bickering following the 2021 season. It’s been a long list of great leadership, great players who stepped into those leadership roles. Guys listened and chose to follow what they were saying. It was a family. You could be an offensive lineman and talk to a DB and it was like y’all had been brothers your whole lives. There was no bickering and no fighting within the team, and if there was, it was all out of love.”
The culture change proved evident in the standings, as Ohio racked up 10 wins and posted a 7-1 record in conference play. The Bobcats thrived in the underdog role, winning four contests with such a label. Ohio punched its first ticket to the MAC Championship Game since 2016, but upon taking center stage in Detroit, Toledo ensured the ghosts of 1968 would continue to roam in Athens. The Bobcats’ unfathomable streak of MAC title futility prolonged.
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“It kind of seemed like one of those goals, to be transparent, that seemed almost unreachable,” Parker said. “When I first came in, I’m coming into a team that’s projected to go undefeated, 12-0, and win a MAC championship, and we go 7-6 by winning our game in the Potato Bowl. It was like, if we’re projected to go undefeated, we have a great offensive line, a great defense, NFL guys on both sides of the ball, a great quarterback, a great coaching staff — it’s like, ‘How the hell are we gonna get this done?’”
2023 only made that coveted MAC championship seem even more unreachable for Ohio. The Bobcats posted a 10-3 record with a signature win over a bowl-bound Iowa State team, all while fielding a top 10 defense in the nation. Yet, two October conference losses derailed a chance at glory, implying that maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.
“We had our sights on the MAC Championship Game and we were that close, and we let it slip,” Titsworth said.
The result of the 2023 campaign felt like a lost opportunity, especially amidst all the personnel turnover in the ensuing offseason; in fact, 94 percent of Ohio’s offensive production, a majority of their defensive starters, and their offensive and defensive coordinators all left either due to graduation, transfer or new opportunities. The refurbished 2024 roster would feature an astounding 53 new players.
The mountaintop of Detroit for the MAC Championship Game suddenly seemed thousands of miles further — but not to the captain wearing No. 69.
“No one from the player perspective batted an eye. It was time to step up,” Titsworth said. “A lot of guys who were transfer guys were leaders of their team, and they came in and did a great job listening and leading their position group, chiming in when it was the right time to chime in. We were the best kept secret in the MAC. We didn’t know what we were gonna be until we played a game, and when we saw what we did at Syracuse — even though we lost that game — we felt we had something good, and it was gonna be dangerous in the MAC.”
It was indeed dangerous in the MAC. Titsworth said the 2024 squad felt like a team of destiny after road victories at Central Michigan and Toledo — two sites where Ohio historically struggled to win. The Bobcats strolled into Detroit on a five-game win streak, and earned a rematch against in-state rival Miami (OH) — the only MAC team to defeat Ohio all season.
“We dropped the game during the regular season,” Titsworth said. “We were missing some guys. It was in a hostile atmosphere, and we didn’t have a lot of energy coming out in the first game. You know the old saying, ‘It’s hard to beat a team twice.’ We shifted some things in our gameplan, and it was probably my favorite gameplan that we ever had.”
Ohio manufactured a commanding 38-3 advantage with 6:45 remaining in the fourth quarter and the long-awaited championship was imminent. The entire roster stood on its feet, jumping and grinning from ear-to-ear on the sidelines as a fervent celebration awaited at midfield. Meanwhile, Titsworth reserved a spot on the bench for himself and broke down in tears for roughly 15 minutes until the trophy ceremony, reflecting on the No. 1 accomplishment he envisioned from the time he onboarded as a walk-on.
What it means for Parker Titsworth, minutes away from winning a MAC Championship
Titsworth has been in this program as a player longer than anyone else, played for Solich and Albin, emotional on the sideline realizing he will finally be a champion pic.twitter.com/IYoP9GbE3p
— Grant Kiefer (@KieferMedia) December 7, 2024
“I just got chills,” Titsworth said recalling the entire moment. “In that moment, for me, it was a ‘we did it.’ Six years of hard work all led to that moment. I don’t think anyone foresaw the domination and the performance that the Bobcats had on that day. When me and the other starters got pulled and we got to see the young guys go in, it was just looking around at the crowd, looking up at the scoreboard and time’s winding down, and you’re like, ‘We really did that. We finally did it.’ It had been since 1968, and everything kind of hit me because I look up in the crowd and see all my boys who are graduated and moved on with their lives. I saw the guys who mentored me up through my career. I’m seeing a bunch of smiles and energy. We’re winning by 30 points and guys are still hammering away. It’s something that makes you feel proud.”
Titsworth left as the winningest player in program history. In his final three years, Ohio strung together three-straight 10-win seasons, all capped with bowl wins. The 2024 season represented the Bobcats’ first 11-win campaign ever, and it fittingly ended in a victory over Jacksonville State at the Cure Bowl. The stars perfectly aligned considering the Cure Bowl’s proceeds go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, a cause which Titsworth championed in the early days of NIL. He previously launched his own merchandise shop — where pink No. 69 jerseys were a top-selling item — and donated the proceeds from his sales to breast cancer research.
“It was a full circle moment to play for a cause and a reason other than for myself and for the team,” Titsworth said of finishing his college career at the Cure Bowl. “I got to play for my grandmother and people who have been battling breast cancer, so that was wholesome, and the entire trip was a blast.”
Recruiting himself to the NFL stage
Legend spread around Ohio’s campus that Titsworth was once so well-versed in another team’s playbook that he told an opposing defensive lineman that he was misaligned. When asked to confirm, Titsworth described the play perfectly from memory, pinpointing the quarter and game when it occurred.
“That was the Buffalo game in 2022,” Titsworth said. “They had run a particular stunt out of a personnel grouping in five-down, and I told him, ‘Hey, you’re misaligned. You and so-and-so need to switch.’ We threw a post route to Sam Wiglusz for a 40-yard gain, and we could hear the defensive linemen as we’re running down the field saying, ‘Hey, we were misaligned.’ They showed that and they ran it wrong.”
As evidenced by that recollection, Titsworth mastered the art of the film session, and plenty of that is due to his memory. The center can recall the exact date of nearly every moment in his life on the spot — a memory his mom describes as “photographic.”
“When it comes to things he loves and is passionate about, he remembers everything,” Todd Titsworth said.
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This memory perfectly complemented his academic pursuits, and Titsworth become an annual Academic All-MAC selection. He balanced a six-year college football career with a triple major in finance, sports management, and business management and strategic leadership, in addition to earning a master’s degree. His photographic memory also helped with the digestion of playbooks, allowing Parker to be the cognizant player on the field at all times. He believes his intellect is a defining feature of his game that could allow him to thrive at an NFL level.
“My field IQ and situational awareness and overall awareness of the game, it’s very slow to me,” Parker Titsworth said. “I process it very seamlessly. Having a coach like Coach Rudolph, he helped me in so many ways. I’m forever thankful for him and his teaching with his meetings outside of football. He allowed for me to identify things in the defense and look for things in the defense that players wouldn’t traditionally look at. I’m sure it’s completely different in the NFL as they’re paid millions of dollars to not tell you when they’re blitzing, but every player’s got their toe, and mine’s being able to identify that.”
But Titsworth wasn’t invited to the Combine. He wasn’t invited to the Senior Bowl. Despite leading Ohio to its most successful stretch in history as a consistent starter, he isn’t a commonality in mock drafts. But to Titsworth, it’s just the same story he’s lived as a football player since his high school days.
“My recruiting services guy told me I was too small to play Division II offensive line, let alone Division I,” Titsworth said. “My whole life, everyone has told me that I can’t do it. I’m trying to prove to myself that I can accomplish the goals and expectations that I set for myself, and that starts with getting picked up by an NFL team. If you tell me not to do something or I can’t do something, it doesn’t faze me.”
All he needs is to recruit himself another opportunity, and as proven at Ohio, the ultimate result can go down in the history books.