Jordan Mailata’s road from South Sydney Rabbitohs misfit to Philadelphia Eagles star

Once a lowly paid misfit at the South Sydney Rabbitohs with a side job on a demolition crew, Jordan Mailata is now an NFL sensation just one win away from a spot in Super Bowl.

Jordan Mailata is one win away from the Super Bowl. Picture: Scott Taetsch/Getty Images

The biggest player in this NFC Championship game is a 6-foot-8, 365-pound lineman who grew up playing the wrong sport. Long before he was dwarfing the NFL’s most menacing pass rushers, Jordan Mailata’s real dream was to play professional rugby league in his native Australia.

The only problem was that even rugby league thought he was too huge.

So on a long shot, Mailata flew to the U.S. ready to give up his rugby league future and learn a sport where he might never carry the ball again. Five years later and nearly 10,000 miles from home, he’s Philadelphia’s favourite Sydneysider, because the man from Down Under is the one keeping quarterback Jalen Hurts right side up.

“He’s not a rugby league boy anymore,” said Jamie Eid, Mailata’s youth coach in Australia. “He looks like an NFL player now.”

Mailata left the South Sydney Rabbitohs for the NFL International program in the United States. Picture: Supplied

Mailata, an offensive tackle on Hurts’s blind side, is in his fifth full season in the league and his rapid development earned him a four-year, $64 million contract extension. But on Sunday, he’ll face one of the toughest tasks of his career in the U.S. When the Eagles take on the San Francisco 49ers, it will be his job to keep a lid on the likes of San Francisco defensive end Nick Bosa, who led the league in sacks this season.

“You knew you found something unique,” says Aden Durde, who trained and coached Mailata when he first came to the U.S.

At this point, Mailata is no longer a secret, and not just because he’s impossible to miss. He’s also proven to be unusually gifted in a sport that was completely foreign to him for most of his life. In just a handful of years, Mailata went from being a lowly paid rugby league misfit with a side job on a demolition crew to one of the highest-paid offensive wrecking balls in the NFL.

That the Eagles took a chance on him in the first place reflects the team’s unorthodox approach to rebuilding their team after winning the Super Bowl in 2017. They took a quarterback, Hurts, in the second round of the draft even when they already had a supposed franchise quarterback on the roster. And to protect him, they found a star tackle who had barely watched any American football.

To get to Jalen Hurts, you have to go through Jordan Mailata. Picture: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

The son of Samoan immigrants to Australia, Mailata focused his childhood on a distant cousin of the game known as rugby league. Played with 13 to a team on a regulation field, as opposed to rugby union, which has 15 players a side, it’s a faster, more physical version of the sport that demands endless running.

That’s why most players as enormous as Mailata struggle in rugby league. They simply don’t have the endurance to barrel around the entire field for 80 minutes while playing both offence and defence. But as Mailata got older — and bigger — he continued to stun his opponents, first for a Sydney youth team called the Bankstown Bulls and then with the Five Docks Dockers.

“At first, they were just shocked at the pure size of him,” says Eid, who coached him at both clubs. “Then after a few games, he was known as a wrecking ball. It literally took five, six players to bring him to the ground.”

By coincidence, Eid was already an NFL fan. Though he had always played and coached rugby league, several trips to the U.S. had led him to fall in love with the New York Giants. But Mailata showed no such interest. In 2017, he had a breakout season with the Dockers and got one step closer to his Australian dream. NRL clubs offered Mailata “train and trial” contracts to join their camps and compete for a spot on their 30-man rosters in deals initially worth just over $4,000.

Soon, Mailata was trying to break through with a club called the South Sydney Rabbitohs, only to be met with scepticism that he could keep up with the pace of the pros. So Mailata decided to take his chances with another sport that had two clear advantages. One, he wouldn’t have to run very much. And two, it might properly value his hulking frame.

Mailata, now 25, flew to the U.S., attended a tryout, and gained admission into the International Player Pathway, an NFL program that immerses foreigners in the sport and allowed Mailata to train at the prestigious IMG Academy.

The only thing less likely than Mailata learning the game so quickly was that his crash course in American football would be taught by a Brit. Durde was born in England and played linebacker for teams like the Hamburg Sea Devils in the now-defunct NFL Europe. Then he became a coach and a natural fit to help lead the IPP.

Mailata’s physical gifts were as obvious to Durde as everyone else. What truly separated him, however, was his capacity to rapidly absorb information and the nuances of blocking — a concept that simply doesn’t exist in most other sports and is actually expressly disallowed in rugby league.

“I thought he could be whatever he wanted to be,” Durde says.

Before the draft in 2018, every team had a representative in attendance at Mailata’s pro day, which means all 32 clubs had the chance to glimpse his raw, yet unbelievable talent. Despite his remarkable size, he showed uncanny quickness that day — his performance in some of the drills would have placed him in the top 10 of the tackles at that year’s NFL combine.

When it came to the draft, though, teams kept passing until the Eagles traded up in the seventh round to get the 233rd pick. Then their selection flashed on television: Jordan Mailata, South Sydney Rabbitohs. (Which is how the Australian slang for itinerant rabbit-meat salesmen wound up on television sets across America.)

Mailata training in his first year with the Philadelphia Eagles. Picture: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

Once the Eagles took Mailata, though, his roster spot was far from guaranteed. That’s true of all seventh-round picks, but this one was a complete novice at football with no experience from college or even high school. But oddly enough, he didn’t consider this to be a disadvantage. In fact, he thought it helped him as he mastered the craft of blocking.

“It was just easier to pick up everything like a clean slate,” Mailata said before the start of the 2018 season. “I didn’t have any bad habits.”

Still, the learning curve was steep. The dense NFL playbooks may as well have been written in Cyrillic. When he played all four quarters of a pre-season game that rookie year, he was flagged for two false start penalties. He then suffered season-ending injuries during his first and second years in the league before ever stepping on the field for a regular season game.

His progress since then has been remarkable. He took over for an injured starter in 2020, beat out a first-round pick for the full-time job in 2021 and is now widely considered among the best tackles in the league. The Eagles didn’t hesitate last year to lock him into a lavish contract — one that pays him more than 10 times the salary of the NRL’s biggest stars. That’s why his performance will go a long way toward determining whether or not the Eagles advance to their fourth Super Bowl this Sunday.

Durde still keeps a keen eye on Eagles games. That’s because he enjoys watching his former pupil. It’s also because it’s his job to beat Mailata: Durde is now the defensive line coach for the Dallas Cowboys.

Another interested and slightly conflicted spectator is in Australia, where it will already be Monday when Eid tunes into the action.

“I’m probably the only New York Giants supporter with a soft spot for the Philadelphia Eagles,” he said.

– Wall Street Journal

Originally published as Jordan Mailata’s road from South Sydney Rabbitohs misfit to Philadelphia Eagles star