‘We’re here now’: Inside Australia’s NFL takeover… and search for the ‘next Jordan Mailata’
Jordan Mailata’s journey to the NFL started with a highlight reel.
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There wasn’t much for Will Bryce and Aden Durde, who were part of the NFL’s international pathways program at the time, to go off outside of what they could see on the screen.
And they had a few questions, like was Mailata actually that big?
“Or are the people he’s playing against just short?” Bryce laughed, speaking to foxsports.com.au back in 2023.
Bryce got his answer when he tested Mailata and a few other international players in late 2016 at a field in Los Angeles. It was around an 11,000-kilometre trip for both of them.
In the case of Mailata, the 14-hour flight from Sydney to Los Angeles changed his life and delivered the NFL International Pathway Program (IPP) its greatest success story.
Now, fresh off Philadelphia’s win over Kansas City in Super Bowl LIX, three new Australians are looking to following in Mailata’s footsteps as part of the IPP, including former Wallabies standout Jordan Petaia and ex-NRL player Laitia Mocedreike.
But Bryce is also no longer having to make Zoom calls at odd hours or watch highlight reels to get a sense for the emerging talent coming out of Australia.
He is now head of APAC, the NFL’s Gold Coast academy that services the entire Asia-Pacific region and that boots-on-the-ground approach is already having an immediate impact.
Bryce is finding himself getting stopped more often by parents, who spot him in his NFL Academy T-shirt, asking where their child can play flag football.
The Academy is going to be announcing dates for free tryouts soon, while it also has an email which people can send highlights and photos of student-athletes to.
Most importantly, no experience is necessary. After all, Mailata didn’t have any when his highlights package landed in Bryce’s inbox in that London carpark all those years ago.
The Academy only opened in April last year and Bryce stressed it is still in its infancy.
“But we’re getting a lot more traction now,” he added.
“Super Bowl, Jordan (Mailata), the game in Melbourne. We’re here now.”
The goal isn’t necessarily finding the next Jordan Mailata. He is, as Bryce called him, “one of one”.
It would unrealistic to expect any of the athletes that come through the Academy or are identified by Bryce to go on to become a top-five player in the league at their position.
Instead, think of the ‘next Jordan Mailata’ as more of a concept. The idea that there are more Jordan Mailatas out there, with untapped potential and in need of someone to see the vision.
On a broader scale, the Academy aims to identify and develop young prospects with ambitions of playing American football at the highest level.
But that doesn’t mean giving up whatever other sports they may have been playing or taking part in.
In fact, Bryce and the rest of the staff at the Academy want their athletes — who have backgrounds in rugby league, union, basketball and swimming among other sports — to be as multi-skilled as possible.
After all, look at the success Mailata had transferring his strengths as a rugby league player to the NFL field.
“You’ve got the quickness of a rugby league player in that body with that physical advantage,” Bryce said.
“Therefore, when he’s in a combative situation he’s able to have the balance, body control in contact, change the direction and foot quickness that others just don’t have because if you’re Jordan Mailata and you grew up in America you’re probably only ever playing American football and you’re only ever going to be developing a certain skill set for that sport.
“Jordan is ahead of his peers from a physical development standpoint because of the sports that he was able to benefit from putting himself through growing up here in Australia.
“That’s something that we value massively. We encourage all these kids at our Academy to continue to play other sports.”
It also means going into the whole process with an open mind, not only when it comes to the student-athletes themselves as prospects but the position they could end up playing in too.
“We’ve got to get these kids ready for what any coach sees them as and asks him to do,” added Bryce.
“We need to build robust versatile athletes, whether that’s IPP, the next Jordan Mailata.”
Philadelphia celebrate Super Bowl win! | 01:45
Dave Tuinauvai, the founder of Conquest Athletic Performance, is also helping put American football on the map in Australia.
In 2023 he started running combines in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, which are watched live online by scouts from NFL teams and “open to anyone”.
“It was a good eye-opener to see what was actually out there,” Tuinauvai said.
Tuinauvai has a background in strength and conditioning, having worked with the Tongan national rugby league team for eight years and, most recently, with Tonga Rubgy Union.
Separate from the combine, Tuinauvai also takes in a limited number of new athletes each year for training at Conquest and while existing athletes can recommend others to join, there is always one rule.
“A big thing around Conquest and how we’ve built it is you’ve got to earn our trust in order to be given an opportunity,” Tuinauvai told foxsports.com.au.
Tuinauvai said his program has “grown massively” since the early 2010s when he first started it with the help of former University of Hawaii offensive line coach Chris Naeole, who is now an international scout with the Eagles, while Conquest has also partnered with retired NFL running back Marshawn Lynch.
He helped run a session with Tuinauvai back in 2017 and has stayed in touch ever since, wanting to help open the doors for athletes in Australia.
“It was always dribs and drabs,” Tuinauvai said.
“There wasn’t, I guess, a real influx of kids wanting to chase this. But fast-forward to now, and we’ve now got guys in college in Division 1, guys now in the NFL.”
Ravens offensive tackle Daniel Faalele was the first NFL player to come out of Conquest, having been selected by Baltimore in the fourth round of the 2022 draft.
Then came Laekin Vakalahi, who was signed by Philadelphia as an undrafted free agent at the start of last season, is now a Super Bowl champion. And now, everyone is asking Tuinauvai the same questions.
How did he do it? Can I come down and get an evaluation?
“It’s definitely changing the landscape,” Tuinauvai said.
“But more important, it’s showing these kids that there is an opportunity there, if you’re willing to put the work in.”
It is also changing the conversation for kids like Faalele, Vakalahi and even Mailata, who was told he was too big to make it professionally in rugby league.
But it’s not just league.
“There’s a multitude of sports now starting to see that they are maybe too big for their sport or they can understand that they enjoy more the contact side of gridiron and know that Jordan and Laekin both never played before and can go down this route,” Tuinauvai said.
“It’s definitely shifting.”
Here, foxsports.com.au highlights four Australian and New Zealand-born athletes who have worked with either Tuinauvai or Bryce and speak to that changing dynamic.
All four have been inspired by Mailata and are on their own journeys towards potentially realising their NFL dream.
Eagles celebrate Super Bowl in Philly | 00:31
LUKE FELIX-FUALALO
The ‘scrapyard’ technique and ‘healing process’ behind NFL draft hopeful’s rise
In the case of right tackle Luke Felix-Fualalo, his journey towards declaring for the NFL draft actually started on a basketball court and with a few blunt words from an American import.
It was 2015 and Felix-Fualalo had grown a “little bored” of rugby union. So, he decided to give basketball a go. His local team, the Suncoast Clippers, were holding a training camp.
By the end of the try-out, former college basketball player Eren Moses, who was helping out as a coach, approached Felix-Fualalo.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think you’ll be a good basketball player,” the Brisbane native recalls being told.
“But I think you’d be a good football player instead and there’s actually clubs down the road I could introduce you to.”
So, with basketball out of the equation, Felix-Fualalo turned his attention to American football and joined the Sunshine Coast Spartans Gridiron Club.
As for where Tuinauvai and Conquest came in, it was also a chance meeting that put Felix-Fualalo even further down the path to potentially being drafted into the NFL.
It was 2017. Felix-Fualalo was throwing the football around at school one day when his P.E. teacher Simon Peters, who happened to be an old friend of Tuinauvai, asked what he was doing.
Felix-Fualalo tried to play it down but his friend told Peters he played for the Spartans.
Only the week before Felix-Fualalo had seen an article in the paper on now Baltimore Ravens tackle Daniel Faalele travelling to Florida to attend the IMG Academy.
Cleary chats Luai’s exit & 5-peat dreams | 04:56
Faalele was an aspiring basketball player when he first walked into Conquest in 2015. Within a few years, he went from the “world’s biggest water boy” to an in-demand talent — and that was despite not watching an actual football game before he arrived at IMG.
Felix-Fualalo, who initially was introduced to the sport in movies, had also never watched a game before joining the Spartans and quickly falling in love with American football.
Once that happened, he and his mother tried to get in touch with schools and colleges online and they would get some responses, but they were all small programs and it would involve paying their own way.
“I was like, ‘Oh man, I need to find a way to go out there’, but I had no idea how to,” Felix-Fualalo said.
“I was just living life and then by chance I happened to find the person… it was like the universe was like, ‘Oh good thing I know the guy who sent him there’.
“So Simon gave me Dave’s number and one day just out of the blue I gave him a call.
“I don’t think Dave was expecting it.”
Felix-Fualalo wasn’t expecting, or at least wasn’t prepared, for what was waiting for him at Conquest either. He hadn’t grown up lifting or doing any strength and conditioning, so he got his first taste with Tuinauvai.
“He completely whooped my ass,” Felix-Fualalo laughed.
“I mean, he can tell you about all the times I threw up at every workout. I was way behind. Everyone was faster, stronger than me and then there was shark tank.”
Shark tank?
“That was one of Dave’s drills,” Felix-Fualalo said.
“There was someone in the middle and then everyone would be in a line and we’d just hop in the ring and have to fight the person in the ring, one person would go out, the next would come in and one person stays in the ring for a few rounds.”
Which would be hard work for anyone, let alone Felix-Fualalo, who “didn’t want to hit anyone”.
“But I was definitely flying getting absolutely hammered.”
Felix-Fualalo described his experience at Conquest as “transformative”. In the early stages, the max weights the boys around him were lifting were heavier than his warm-up weights.
“It took me a long time to catch up,” he said.
“But one thing I take pride in is I started behind everyone but eventually I ended up overtaking a lot of people along the way and lasted longer than most of them.
“I’m surprised I even made it this far to be lucky enough to be considered in the draft, starting from where I started.”
Where Felix-Fualalo started was with “a lot of YouTube”. In fact, he still remembers the quick, four-minute video he watched titled ‘How does American football work?’ and conversations with friends, who told him there was “this weird thing called special teams”.
“And I was like, ‘Special teams, what’s that?’ Then slowly I’d get to googling technique videos, how things worked.”
But by the time Felix-Fualalo arrived in California, where he played one year at L.A.’s Cathedral High School alongside former first overall pick Bryce Young, he quickly found himself back in the same position he started in at Conquest.
“It was all very daunting and I was still kind of way behind everyone in high school,” Felix-Fualalo said.
He came up with what he calls his own “scrapyard technique” for playing at right tackle. Scrapyard because it was the combination of everything Felix-Fualalo had been taught by high school and college coaches along with watching YouTube tutorials and pulling up NFL games.
Some coaches didn’t understand it. “What are you doing?” they would ask.
But former University of Hawai’i co-offensive coordinator Roman Sapolu, who is now an offensive assistant at the Miami Dolphins, saw it differently and he came into Felix-Fualalo’s life when he needed him most.
Before finding himself again in Hawai’i, Felix-Fualalo had spent his senior year at Mater Dei in Santa Ana, becoming a three-star national recruit and later landing a scholarship to Utah.
Burgess impressed by Vegas vibe | 02:23
“A lot happened with Utah,” Felix-Fualalo said.
“Being in America during COVID, not seeing family, literally not going home for like two and a half years. Home changes in that time. You come back, some people aren’t there anymore.
“I lost some teammates (Ty Jordan and Aaron Lowe) at Utah and all that. That’s what led me to Hawaii.
“And then Hawai’i just kind of, I don’t know, it brought me back down to the ground.”
Felix-Fualalo described it as a “healing process”.
“Just being on the island itself, it’s just magical,” he added.
“The place, the people, the lifestyle, and it felt a lot like home as well.”
It was home in more ways than one, even for that unconventional, “scrapyard” technique.
“There are coaches that will say it’s my way or the highway,” Felix-Fualalo said.
“For me, I struggled with that because sometimes I wasn’t used to driving on that highway that everyone else had been driving on their whole lives.
“But coach Sapolu was just like, ‘Find that natural path that the river takes and you’ll find your own rhythm, your own groove’, and then everything just kind of flowed from that.
“He also gave me a lot of great technique to work with in general, but then I found my game that worked well for me and that’s what really helped me take off a lot.”
Prior to arriving at the University of Hawai’i, Felix-Fualalo had appeared in 11 games over three seasons with Utah and played primarily on special teams.
He also appeared mainly as a reserve linemen and on special teams in his first year with the Rainbow Warriors. But in 2023, Felix-Fualalo played all 13 games with 11 starts at right tackle.
He allowed just one sack in 491 pass blocking snaps and was given an overall grade of 74.8 by Pro Football Focus, which ranked No. 3 among tackles in the Mountain West.
“I just really can’t describe it,” Felix-Fualalo said of that season.
“But as I really fought more to get on the field and earn my spot, I kind of just fell into believing in myself a lot more, being more confident in myself, and then actually getting on the field and doing it because it took me so long to actually get to the point where I could play.
“I doubted if I could even play because I spent like 95 per cent of my time just practising football and not actually playing on the field. And then I get on the field. I’m like, ‘Wow, this is much easier than I expected’.
“Then just that kind of confidence and belief in myself really just elevated everything else.”
It coalesced into a standout game against Oregon, which Felix-Fualalo “really wanted to play in” because it meant proving himself against the number one defence and also proving himself to Utah, who he knew was going to see the film.
“I wanted to show them how far I’d come and how much I’d grown,” he said.
Felix-Fualalo did just that, having one of his best games and was given a grade of 79.2 from PFF. His offensive line coach approached him afterwards.
“I’m hands off,” he told the Brisbane native.
“I can just set you free. I can trust you can get the job done. There’s no doubt in you anymore.”
“And I felt that too,” Felix-Fualalo added.
“I went against the best and I did well. I didn’t just do fine. I did really well. It was like, I belong here. I can block. I can protect these guys. I can help us win games. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Vegas teams prepare for NFL-sized fields | 00:43
Now Felix-Fualalo has declared for this year’s NFL draft and is hoping to be the next Australian to have his name called in April.
Although even if that doesn’t end up being the case, it is an achievement to be in this position in the first place, especially when considering where he started.
And as someone who knows what it feels like to fall down, as was the case in shark tank, it won’t be long before Felix-Fualalo gets back up. Because for every failure Felix-Fualalo has had on the road to the NFL, he always thinks back to one passage from an old samurai book: ‘The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried’.
“That’s what it reminds me of,” he said.
“Just all those failures adding up and showing me the right way and transforming me to where I am now. I definitely wouldn’t be here without the many more times I failed than I succeeded.”
And as someone who has been following Mailata’s journey since he was first drafted into the NFL, thinking about #68 also helps Felix-Fualalo get through those moments of self-doubt.
In fact, just the other day when training was getting “tough” for Felix-Fualalo, who is all alone in Texas preparing for the NFL Combine, Landon Dickerson walked into the facility to get treatment.
The sight of the Eagles left guard reminded Felix-Fualalo of Mailata and one particular photo of him at the Super Bowl parade which is saved to his phone.
“Just all that emotion in that photo and knowing his story, I was just happy and it was invigorating,” Felix-Fualalo said.
“And I’m like ‘Man. It would be so cool if the Eagles drafted me. We could be teammates. I could train under him’. It just motivated me even more.”
LAEKIN VAKALAHI
Inside Eagles rookie’s ‘crazy’ journey to Super Bowl glory alongside Mailata
If there is anyone poised to follow in Mailata’s footsteps, it is Laekin Vakalahi. After all, he is already a Super Bowl winner.
“(It is) very crazy,” Vakalahi, who was signed by the Eagles as an undrafted free agent earlier in the year, said.
“Definitely very lucky, blessed. No one really just goes into the NFL, plays football for the first time and is part of the Super Bowl champion team of the world.”
Philadelphia signed Vakalahi onto its roster with an international player roster exemption last year and earlier in the month announced him as one of the team’s future signings, which allows players to compete for roster spots during OTAs (organised team practice activities) and training camp.
Like Felix-Fualalo, the story of how American football was first floated as a possibility for Vakalahi was one of pure chance.
In this case, a friend of Eagles international scout Chris Naeole walked past Vakalahi’s parents while they were on holidays in Hawai’i.
Naeole was in Melbourne at the time helping Tuinauvai run the Conquest American Football Combine when he got a call from his friend, who had started speaking with Vakalahi’s father Frank.
Vakalahi was on a mission in New Zealand at the time but Frank shared a few photos with Naeole.
Once the mission service was complete, Naeole set up a workout with Vakalahi on a soccer field 10 minutes from Wellington airport. When that was done, he called Tuinauvai.
“All right, he’s our next one, I’m going to send him to you,” he said.
So, after a few weeks of travel Vakalahi was on his way to Melbourne and spent a month working out with Tuinauvai. It didn’t take long for Vakalahi to prove he was “very different”.
“He was very motivated,” Tuinauvai said.
“He didn’t understand the game, he didn’t even understand his body to be honest. So it took a little bit of time just to unlock what I knew was inside him.
“With Laekin, for me, what really resonated was when he started getting the phone calls with the Eagles.”
Then came the phone call. The one that Vakalahi got when he was at church, having to excuse himself to step out and take that call that has already changed his life.
“I was just kind of star-struck,” Vakalahi said of the moment he found out the Eagles were signing him.
“I have a video of it, I was just kind of sitting there and I didn’t know what to say. It was really crazy to me.
“I just got home a month ago before that happened and couldn’t believe something this big was happening to me at that time.”
American football, let alone the NFL, had previously not been anywhere near Vakalahi’s radar. Up until Year 10, he had been playing for the Werribee Bears and while he dabbled in basketball and rugby union, making the NRL was the dream.
But, like Mailata, the goalposts had shifted.
And like Mailata, Vakalahi found out that American football better suited his physicality.
“A lot of the bigger boys love the contact, they love hitting people but at the same time they don’t like doing Broncos up and down the rugby field how many times,” Vakalahi said.
“We’re calling it the big man’s dream. During practice you don’t have to do all that cardio with all the backs and everything that you have to in rugby.
“You have that four minutes of explosiveness which is still very tiring and you get a break but I talk to Jordan about this as well but we definitely think that the cardio in rugby was a lot more than the cardiovascular endurance that you need to have in football.
“So I definitely think it’s pretty optimal for the bigger boys if you don’t want to be running up and down the field all game long.”
Although as optimal as it may have been, again like Mailata, it didn’t take long for Vakalahi to realise how much he had to learn.
“I definitely remember in the classroom I understood things pretty decently, a lot of things and then I got onto the field and, man, it didn’t translate so easy, aye?” he said.
Take the first time Vakalahi tried to get into his proper stance at rookie minicamp.
“It looked very awkward,” he laughed. “I’ve seen the film and it did not look good at all.”
Thankfully, he had the perfect mentor to learn from.
Vakalahi and his parents got dinner with Mailata outside his hotel when he was in the Gold Coast last year to promote the opening of the NFL’s Academy in Australia.
That was before Vakalahi officially got the call from Philadelphia, and so at that point he wasn’t sure if he was talking to his soon-to-be teammate. But if he was?
“I thought, is everyone else over there going to be this big?” Vakalahi laughed.
Even he, at 6-foot-5 and 318 pounds, could not believe how “humungous” Mailata was.
Mailata had plenty of advice to share with Vakalahi at the time and then when the 22-year-old ended up in Philadelphia, he had two key tips to add, both of which Mailata lives on a daily basis.
The first was putting in extra work.
“And he’s always encouraging me to do the same,” Vakalahi said.
“He has high expectations and I’m grateful for it because I know he wants me to be great.”
The second was to live in the moment or, as offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland puts it, “be where your feet are”.
And again, Mailata was living proof of it. Vakalahi remembers one night earlier in the season when he was driving with his new teammate.
“Jordan was coming up against a good pass rusher,” Vakalahi said.
So naturally, at least for Vakalahi, the conversation turned to the weekend’s game.
“How are you feeling for tomorrow,” he asked.
“I’m not thinking about tomorrow bro,” Mailata replied, “I’m just enjoying tonight”.
“And when he told me that I was like, ‘Well, you’re about to verse one of the biggest pass rushers in the world’.
“But it just made me think man. It’s such a good principle, especially for football as well with the long-ass season. You can’t be thinking about all the weeks ahead of you, you can’t be thinking about the game (coming up)… just think about the day and what’s going on in front of you and everything else will fall into place.”
That is exactly what happened for the Eagles last season. There was plenty of outside noise; question marks over coach Nick Sirianni after an underwhelming 2-2 start to the year.
But by the end of the season they were lifting the Lombardi Trophy and Vakalahi had a Super Bowl ring. Although he technically doesn’t have it yet.
The players have been fitted for the rings and may have to wait a few more months to get them. You won’t find Vakalahi complaining though.
Even being at Lincoln Financial Field for home games is more than enough motivation for Vakalahi to push for playing time in his second season.
“Just hearing the crowd roaring and seeing how our games light up the city every week every single Sunday…. it makes me think about how crazy of an opportunity this is and how much I want to play even more,” he said.
Coach Stoutland told Vakalahi he had been making “good progress” but while most 22-year-olds would be swept away by the bright lights of Caesar’s Superdome and Super Bowl week, Vakalahi never forgot where he came from.
In fact, he called Tuinauvai the night before the big game.
“I knew before everything had happened that he was the chosen one and he had the attributes to go to the next step,” Tuinauvai said.
“The one thing about Laekin, the best part is he’s always checking in. He’s always asking me about the boys… even the night before the Super Bowl, which speaks volumes.”
NIKAU HEPI
An ‘unreal’ week as the offers start coming in for talented teenager
At 6-foot-7 and 350 pounds, just under the 6-foot-8, 365-pound frame Jordan Mailata is listed under, it is easy to see how Nikau Hepi could follow in the Super Bowl winner’s footsteps.
Although as Bryce, head of NFL Academy Asia-Pacific, tries to tell anyone who will listen, Mailata is “one of one” and everyone has to “run their own race”.
But that doesn’t mean the Academy isn’t reminding its students how far Mailata has come and how far he still wants to go. Because to them, he’s their “inspiration” according to Bryce.
“He’s everything to them,” he added. They even have kids at the Academy who either wear or want to wear #68, including Hepi.
Mailata’s jersey is in the locker room at the Academy along with an Eagles helmet, and it has been there since he arrived on the Gold Coast last year to announce its opening.
Hepi is always looking at it, holding it in his hands.
“Just thinking to myself,” Hepi said, “one day this will come. That’s what I’m hoping for”.
For Hepi, who was born in New Zealand before moving to Perth at the age of five and later to the Gold Coast, he started running his own race early last year when the Academy announced it would be having open tryouts.
Hepi didn’t have any experience. He’d never watched a snap of American football, having grown up playing rugby league six he was six years old while he also graduated from Keebra Park — one of the NRL’s most fertile breeding grounds.
But he had seen Mailata, and more importantly, he had seen where the Philadelphia Eagles left tackle started from.
So, Hepi showed up for the tryout and a few weeks later got a message from Bryce saying that he wanted the 17-year-old offensive lineman to join the Academy.
Hepi has already come a long time in his short period at the Academy, recalling the “massive difference” between his stance when he first started with coach Bryce and how it looks now.
Fast-forward almost a year and earlier in the week Hepi received his first preliminary Division 1 offer at Auburn University and within a few days, another two programs had come calling.
“I’m still pretty stoked about it… it’s been a crazy past week,” Hepi said.
“Especially the way it’s just happened so fast. I’ve got three offers in the span of a week. It’s been just mind-blowing to be honest.”
While the offers may keep coming, Auburn will always be the first to show interest in Hepi — and that means something.
“It was unreal just knowing that they’re the first school who’s recognised me and reached out and seen what I can do just from little bits,” he said.
“They’re the ones that first believed in me and offered me that scholarship.”
While rugby league was all Hepi really knew before transitioning to American football, like Mailata he quickly noticed there were clear benefits to his new sport.
“It’s definitely been a lot easier because American football is so different,” Hepi said.
“It’s a lot (of) short but more explosive, intense movements compared to rugby league. Rugby league is an endurance-based game, a lot of conditioning going into it.
“Being the size that I am and there’s just so many conditioning standards in rugby league people my size aren’t able to physically endure.”
BEN KEY
‘Thrown into the fire’ and coming out the other side
Ben Key also started out in rugby league, having spent most of his life playing for the Doveton Steelers in south east Melbourne.
It was actually rugby league that set Key on a path to American football as some of his teammates were already training with Tuinauvai and recommended he get in touch too.
Little did Key know what he was getting himself into.
What started out as “pretty intense” training sessions, which Key said were “almost military style”, later turned into interest from University of Hawaii offensive line coach Chris Naeole.
Naeole, who is now an international scout for the Philadelphia Eagles and has built a strong working relationship with Tuinauvai, suggested Key could play defensive line.
Key didn’t even really know what that was. Like many of the boys who end up at Conquest, his knowledge of American football was limited to watching the Super Bowl and not much more.
“I didn’t know what the different positions were until I went up there,” Key, whose first taste of the NFL was a game between the Cardinals and Steelers in 2009, said.
“I just got thrown into the fire and just started learning from there.”
Key’s journey, like Felix-Fualalo, started at Cathedral High in Los Angeles where he played a year on offence before transitioning to defence at East Los Angeles College.
There, Key became one of the top defensive end prospects in the junior college ranks. ESPN ranked him the 41st overall junior college prospect in 2020 and had him fourth at defensive tackle specifically.
Key played six games in his first year of junior college, making 14 tackles including five tackles for a loss and four sacks while as a sophomore in 2019 he totaled 40 tackles, including 6.5 tackles for loss and three quarterback sacks in 10 games, while also forcing a pair of fumbles and recovering one.
But it was once Key enrolled at Missouri and was playing in the SEC that the Australian native was forced to take his game to another level.
“I had to realise these are big boys, because I’m in the trenches too, you can’t be second guessing myself in the position I’m in,” Key said.
“I just learned from my mistakes and just kept having extra time with coaches and they understood my situation and they were training me, teaching me more of the game and the fundamentals and stuff.”
Key missed most of spring practice in his first year, having committed to Missouri late after initially pledging to Mississippi State only for head coach Joe Moorhead to be fired.
It meant he played just two games for the Tigers before a redshirt season in 2021 and another two years in Las Vegas, where Key appeared in two college games and recorded three total tackles.
“I’m just ready to go out there and show what I can do to the next school,” he said.
Key, who is in the portal right now, has already had some schools get in touch and said he would likely have a decision on the next stop in his journey after the Spring Bowl.
But wherever that may be and whatever may be on the horizon for the Australian defensive lineman, he knows he too can realise his impossible dream. Mailata is living proof of it.
“He’s a big inspiration to us boys,” Key said.
“And I hope he keeps doing his thing; keeps opening doors for us.”
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Shedeur Sanders confident he can be franchise-changing QB: ‘If that’s…
Plenty of quarterbacks have stepped to the podium in Indianapolis and promised they'd bring transformative change to their future employer. But Sanders wa
