For most of the players at the Super Bowl, Sunday’s game will be the culmination of a lifelong journey to the greatest stage of the sport. For Jordan Mailata, the Eagles’ LT/BFG (left tackle/Big Friendly Giant), the trip to Arizona has been more strange than long.
“They’ve been dreaming about this since they were kids,” Mailata said. “Honestly, to me, the Super Bowl dream has only started five years ago.”
Mailata’s path to the Super Bowl is not just uncommon; it is unprecedented. When the Eagles drafted the humongous Australian in 2018, he had never played football before. Never. When he first saw a playbook, “I thought it was an instruction manual to build a spaceship,” he said. He is the only player in NFL history to be drafted without attending any sort of college; for his Sunday Night Football player intro, Mailata claimed to be a graduate of “Jeff Stoutland University,” a reference to the Eagles offensive line coach who taught him just about everything he knows about the sport he plays professionally. In Australia, Mailata had watched a few Super Bowls—it’s on Monday morning down there—but he admits he mainly paid attention to the halftime show. When asked his favorite Super Bowl, he picked “the one where Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, and Coldplay performed ”
The NFL first learned about Mailata from a highlight reel of the young Aussie playing Rugby League. The opposing rugby players didn’t just fail to tackle Mailata, they seemed to explode off of him, like Super Mario Mailata had just powered up with a magic mushroom. “He was unstoppable, and he actually hurt a few kids because he was such a big kid,” one of his teammates told the website of the National Rugby League in 2018.
But he wouldn’t become a star in the sport he grew up playing. Mailata played in the feeder system of the South Sydney Rabbitohs, the most successful franchise in the history of the NRL, but he never progressed past the club’s developmental teams to play in the actual NRL; their final contract offer to him was $5,000 Australian dollars. “We basically said, ‘Mate, you’re too big,’” the club’s former coach, Michael Maguire, recalled in an interview with an Australian media outlet. “Madge always gave me the brutal truth,” Mailata recalled this week. “I was like, what other game should I go play?”
Across the Pacific, there was a sport where size was a boon rather than a burden.
So Mailata went to the other side of the world to play American football, knowing the bare basics about the sport. “I knew what a touchdown was, how many points a touchdown was, and what a first down was,” Mailata said. Everything else—things Americans learn by osmosis just by existing near football—would have to be taught. “He didn’t know football,” said Eagles assistant offensive line coach Roy Istvan. “[Coaching him was like] when you go to a youth camp, a little kids camp.”
But Mailata’s ridiculous physical traits made the steep learning curve a worthy investment. With an official listed weight of 365 pounds, Mailata is the fourth-heaviest player in the NFL, but he moves with fluidity and speed that recall his days carrying a rugby ball and trying to score.
And yet the only thing bigger than his body is his personality. He always seems to be joking or laughing; right tackle Lane Johnson described him as “radiant.” He has a stunningly beautiful singing voice and plays guitar in the locker room; he was the star of the holiday music album, A Philly Special Christmas, with Jason Kelce and Johnson, and had a stint on The Masked Singer:
(Mailata was eliminated from the show after just two episodes; he blames the early exit on the inability to use autotune in front of the live studio audience.)
Mailata is not the Eagles’ best lineman—Kelce and Johnson are All-Pros—but in the course of just five years, he’s become a critical cog on the best offensive line in football. He won the Eagles’ starting left tackle job last season, and will probably never give it up. The Rabbitohs offered him $5,000 Australian; the Eagles now pay him $16 million a year. In the NFC championship game, he pancaked Nick Bosa, making the likely Defensive Player of the Year look like one of those 18-year old rugby league players on the highlight video that first caught the NFL’s attention:
Everybody involved can take a victory lap here. It’s one of the least probable player development stories in NFL history. “It’s a freakin’ storybook,” said Eagles center Jason Kelce. Stoutland said that when the Eagles played the Jets in preseason, Jets general manager Joe Douglas, a former Eagles front office executive, came up to say that Mailata was Stoutland’s “Mona Lisa.” And Mailata will probably keep getting better: Remember, this guy wasn’t even playing football yet when the Eagles ran the Philly Special five years ago. “This is not a finished product,” Stoutland said. “And he knows it, and that’s the exciting thing.”
None of this would be possible if not for a perfect set of circumstances and timing that worked in Mailata’s favor. He just so happened to come of age at exactly the moment the NFL was starting to build out its infrastructure to bring foreign players into the league. He was scouted and drafted by a team that is better at developing players at his position than any other team in the NFL, and the Eagles were willing to invest serious labor into a long-term development project with no promise of payoff.
But the person most responsible for Mailata’s freakin’ storybook NFL tale is obviously Jordan Mailata. Having the perfect gigantic, athletic body was just the beginning. He’s spent the past five years making the most out of this strange opportunity. The NFL has been praying for an international player like Mailata to simply get his foot in the door to show other foreign players it could be done; then this massive marsupial tore the whole damn door off its hinges.
It may seem strange to find a 6-foot-8, 365-pound Australian at the Super Bowl. America invented football, which is why the rest of the world calls it “American football.” We came up with its bewilderingly complex rules, and we encourage our biggest boys to grow the beefy bodies required to play it. When Mailata played rugby, he was asked to lose weight; when he came over here he needed to pack on pounds.
But as the NFL tries to push fandom past its borders and welcome more foreign-born players onto its rosters, it will start with size. Think about the progression of international talent in the NBA: Today, there are skilled point guards and shooters from just about every continent besides Antarctica. But in the 1980s, the only players reaching the NBA from overseas were 7-footers—Manute Bol, Hakeem Olajuwon, etc. There’s a finite number of people on the planet who are seven feet tall, and plenty of them happen to be born in places besides the United States. As more foreign bigs succeeded in the NBA, more people across the globe became interested in playing basketball, and more NBA teams saw the value of foreign scouting. It snowballed and now the NBA is a sport with an international player base and fans across the globe.
To play offensive tackle in the NFL, you need to be an athletic 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds, at a minimum. As with basketball’s 7-footers, only a relative few people alive fit that description. “We need to find big guys: offensive linemen, defensive linemen,” said Will Bryce, the NFL’s international Head of Football Development. “We don’t necessarily need to try and find wide receivers or running backs. There’s plenty of them just around the corner down here in South Florida.”
Bryce was one of the people in the NFL offices blown away by the highlight video of Mailata trucking youth rugby players in 2017. “You couldn’t help but notice that someone with that much size, with the footwork that he had, he shouldn’t be able to do some of those things,” Bryce said. Bryce entered Mailata into the league’s fledgling International Player Pathway program, which launched in 2016. He was grouped with four other players (two each from Germany and the U.K.) in what was basically football boot camp at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida: “We were like the guinea pigs,” Mailata said. Mailata remembers that there was a group of elite NFL draft prospects who were going through a program at IMG at the same time that got to ride golf carts around the campus while the international players rode bikes. “For me it was just understanding that I have to work two times harder than an American player, because I have to prove myself every day that I belong here,” he said
The NFL’s plan for the program was that after graduating from boot camp, the players would be assigned to the practice squads of NFL teams, on a special roster spot reserved for an international player who would not count against roster limits. But first, they had to get to the point that they wouldn’t be an annoying nuisance for the team they were assigned to. Those days in Bradenton involved learning the basics of football—and not just blocking and throwing and catching. “We have to start from the rules of the game,” Bryce says. “Even just how to put on a helmet, how to take off the helmet, how to put on shoulder pads, how to do that quickly and efficiently, how to drink Gatorade through a bottle with your helmet on.”
Word about this hulking Australian rugby player who had landed in Florida reached the Eagles, and Stoutland attended one of Mailata’s workouts. For Stoutland, it was football love at first sight. “I came back and I said to [general manager Howie Roseman], look: This guy is unusual.” (So far as I can gather, “unusual” is Stoutland Speak for “incredible.”)
So the Eagles didn’t wait to see if Mailata would get assigned to their team through the International Pathway Program: They went out and got him. Because Mailata was 21 years old, he was draft-eligible.”I had no idea what that meant,” Mailata said—and as the 2018 draft ended, Stoutland got antsy. “We get into the seventh round and I go into the room. I’m not even supposed to be in the room,” Stoutland said this week. He says he gave Roseman a look—”he knew what I was there for,” he said—and the message was received. The Eagles were supposed to draft at no. 250, but got nervous: The Steelers, the only other team in attendance at the Mailata workout with Stoutland, were sitting at no. 246. So Philly traded up and drafted the big guy with pick no. 233. The IPP has now placed 26 players on NFL rosters over the years, but Mailata is still the only player drafted out of the program. (German tight end Moritz Boehinger was a sixth-round pick by the Vikings in 2016, shortly before the formal creation of the IPP.)
The Eagles had not drafted a football player; they drafted an extremely large man trying to become a football player. “Early on, you didn’t know how it was going to go,” Kelce says. “You don’t see people starting from ground one often in the NFL. A lot of that stuff has been taught in high school.” Playing offensive line might seem simple to outsiders—be big, keep the other big guys from going around you—but it’s a technique-heavy position where slight mistakes can lead to disaster—and Mailata didn’t know any of the technique. “Nothing translates from rugby,” he said. “I’ve been told a lot of times it’s gotta be like playing rugby... Nah, man! This game is so much harder… if you step six inches too far you can ruin the play”
At first, Mailata struggled. He gave up a strip sack to an undrafted free agent on his very first play in his first preseason game. He didn’t play a regular season snap in his first two seasons in the NFL. Lane Johnson remembers Mailata having issues with the concept of a snap count when he first started playing, leading to Mailata getting off the line of scrimmage late. “He just didn’t know,” Johnson said. “And the only way you’re gonna get better at that is with practice.” Istvan, the assistant offensive line coach, didn’t join the Eagles until 2019, but he recalls a moment when Mailata came up to him to ask what it meant when people said a defense was in a “shell,” the terminology for a defense with two high safeties designed to, in essence, keep all plays contained below it. Remember, Mailata had already been in the NFL for a full year when he asked this relatively basic football question.
At that point, football was a career for Mailata—not a passion. He was working as hard as he could and he was trying his best, but he was halfway across the globe sucking at a sport he didn’t fully understand. “The first two years were pretty hard,” Mailata said. “I was like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” But he had to keep trying: “I had no plan B,” he said. After all, football already was plan B for the ex-rugby guy.
The key to pulling off the tremendous transition from then to now may be Mailata’s indefatigable optimism. This mindset got Mailata through a few years of getting his ass kicked in practice as he learned an impossibly difficult sport by playing against the best players alive. When The Ringer’s Ben Solak profiled Mailata in 2018, Mailata was getting torched every day by actual football players—but joyfully answered questions about his constant failures. “He is unassailably happy to be here… he’s like a baby elephant,” Solak wrote then. “One day he will be majestic, imposing, strong—but for now he can’t stop tripping over his own feet, cheerily trumpeting away with his newly discovered trunk.” Sure enough, he stopped tripping over his feet. When asked when he started to like football, Mailata says that point finally came about two years ago. “When I got really good at it… it became addicting when it became more consistent.” Finally, it’s his passion. “I love football—it’s all I do, all I watch,” he said.
Watching him surrounded by international media all Super Bowl week, it feels obvious that his emergence is a big moment in the rapid globalization of football. Of course, the Australian TV stations are here—Mailata may have watched the Super Bowl to see Beyoncé, but now people Down Under will watch the Super Bowl to see Mailata. Aussies have been playing in the NFL for a while, almost exclusively due to the Australian Rules-to-punting pipeline—the Eagles’ punter, Arryn Siposs, is a former Australian Football League player—but even Australians get that punters aren’t the stars of the show. It’s different when a player is on offense or defense. And it’s not just the Australians: I saw Mailata answer questions from Denmark, Mexico, Japan, and the U.K., many getting at the same thing—if you did this, can somebody from our country make it to this stage?
The IPP program, which had six players when Mailata joined, will have 13 players in its 2023 class. The hope is to assign eight of those to NFL practice squads, twice as many as in 2018. Ten of the 13 are offensive or defensive line prospects, and they are currently going through their bootcamp in Bradenton. When the players get done with their drills on Sunday, they’ll have a little Super Bowl party—and of course, they’re going to “cheer on Jordan,” Bryce, who oversees the international program for the NFL, said.
After all, Mailata is proof that their idea to come to America isn’t so ridiculous after all: He was like them once, a stranger in a strange land playing the world’s strangest sport. Mailata may not have dreamed of playing in the Super Bowl until relatively recently, but he’s helping others across the globe dream. Whoever comes next, their journey will be a bit easier because they’ll get to follow Mailata’s giant footprints.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this piece misstated the number of IPP players in its 2023 class; there are 13, not 11.
