How 6-foot-8, 387-pound Daniel Faalele hopes to follow in Jordan Mailata’s giant footsteps in Australia-to-NFL pipeline

MOBILE, Ala. — Jordan Mailata arrived at IMG Academy in 2018 as a 6-foot-8, 346-pound novelty: a big Australian who had never played football and was trying to become an offensive lineman.

Except he quickly learned he was not as much of a novelty as he thought. Turns out, there was someone similar who had left IMG just a few months earlier. It was Daniel Faalele, a fellow Australian whom he had never met and didn’t know existed until coaches and trainers said they were built like each other.

“No, we’re not! No one’s built like me!” Mailata recalled thinking. “And then I watched some film and I’m like, ‘This motherfucker was as big as a fucking truck!’”

There aren’t many people on the planet who would earn that type of description from Mailata. Then again, there aren’t many people on the planet like Faalele. A Melbourne native who played college football at Minnesota, Faalele measured at 6-foot-8 and 387 pounds with a wingspan of more than 86 inches at the Senior Bowl earlier this month. His profile as a freshman for the Golden Gophers listed him at 6-foot-9 and 400 pounds. He had weighed upwards of 410 pounds before sitting out the 2020 season because of COVID-19 concerns.

The Athletic’s Dane Brugler has Faalele ranked the No. 52 prospect in this spring’s draft. Faalele is expected to be drafted in the first two rounds. And the player Faalele considers his NFL comparison?

“Definitely Jordan Mailata,” Faalele said before one of his Senior Bowl practices. “We share a lot of similarities.”

Mailata was just shy of his 21st birthday when he came to IMG to prepare for the NFL Draft as part of the league’s International Player Pathway program. His first time playing football in a game came against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Faalele was a teenager when he enrolled at IMG as a junior in high school and drew scholarship offers from college football’s heavyweights. He started three years in the Big Ten. He doesn’t come to the NFL as a finished product, but he at least arrives with experience against top-level pass rushers. Mailata was a blank canvas who needed to learn how to get in a pass set and what to do when the ball is snapped. That’s why Mailata was a seventh-round lottery ticket and Faalele will be off the board much earlier. But it’s easy to watch Faalele, hear his story and realize that this is the next player in what they hope can be an Australian pipeline.

“I’ve been following his story since he got to the league in ’18, and he’s been progressing really well,” Faalele said of Mailata. “We’re both big, powerful, explosive.”

Mailata played rugby in Australia when he was persuaded to try football. Faalele’s top sport was basketball. He practiced with his club team in high school when a football coach from Hawaii spotted him. That led to a scholarship offer for a sport he never played. Faalele didn’t even know what a scholarship offer meant. Upon learning what football could provide, it began to sound more tempting. Michigan hosted a satellite camp in his native Melbourne. Faalele attended, and that’s where he was connected with IMG, a boarding school and training facility in Bradenton, Fla.

Faalele didn’t play football games during his first year at IMG. He learned the game and acclimated to the American culture. He relied on teammates Cesar Ruiz and Robert Hainsey, both now NFL players.

“They were able to help me by leading by example with basics of football, the rules and terminology,” Faalele said.

There were aspects of practice that those steeped in football culture understood, but Faalele didn’t. He participated in a walk-through when an offensive lineman only needed to perform his first three steps. Faalele went “full blast.” Teammates asked what he was doing. “I don’t know what I’m doing!” he responded.

This was reminiscent of Mailata’s first spring playing football. There was a water break between drills on a hot afternoon at IMG, and Mailata and another international player went to the Gatorade station needing a drink. Except they stood there for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do, even attempting to drink the Gatorade through their facemasks. They didn’t know how to take off their helmets.

“I’ve been coaching for almost 40 years and … I can’t get this wrong!” said Paul Dunn, an offensive line coach who works with players at IMG as part of the NFL’s International Player Pathway program, in a conversation with his wife about teaching Mailata football. “These two guys don’t even know how to take a drink! There’s no way I can screw this up!”

Dunn doesn’t coach the high school players at IMG, but all the athletes share a weight room. There was a day in Faalele’s first year when Dunn’s son visited the school. The son called his dad and said, “I’ve just seen the largest human being I’ve ever seen.”

Spend a life around football, and that’s a bold statement. But when Dunn saw Faalele, he confirmed his son’s account. The biggest player in the NFL last season was New England’s Trent Brown, who is listed at 6-foot-8 and 380 pounds. So Faalele, assuming his Senior Bowl measurements hold true, would be the biggest player in the NFL as a rookie.

“I was the biggest player in college and high school,” Faalele said. “I’m used to it.”

Faalele was a four-star recruit in 247Sports’ composite rankings in 2018 and ranked the No. 19 offensive tackle in the country despite only one real year of high school ball. He took official visits to Alabama, Georgia and Minnesota. Faalele didn’t grow up steeped in college football tradition and, therefore, wasn’t seduced by those trappings. He felt comfortable at Minnesota with what he termed their “family-oriented” atmosphere. That was appealing for someone whose actual family was on the other side of the world. (Faalele’s mother soon moved to Minnesota, and his brother is a prospect at IMG.)

“I understand the whole culture of leaving everything behind,” Mailata said. “It was a tough gig even at 20 years old. It’s hard to leave everything I knew behind. But I knew I wanted something new. I wanted a new purpose in life.”

Eagles tackle Jordan Mailata blocks against Saints defensive end Marcus Davenport on Nov. 21 at Lincoln Financial Field. (Eric Hartline / USA Today)

When the Eagles drafted Mailata, they were willing to test their patience. Internally, there was the understanding that it might be two seasons before Mailata was ready to take a meaningful snap. Injuries affected the timeline, but the Eagles essentially viewed Mailata’s first two seasons in the NFL as redshirt years. Faalele enters the NFL with the expectation of contributing immediately.

“I feel like I’m right here with everyone,” Faalele said. “I do want to be a starter in the NFL my rookie season. That’s a goal of mine.”

Mailata does not wish he took Faalele’s track to first play left tackle on Saturdays. He believes his advantage was coming directly to the NFL and working immediately with offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland. As Mailata said, there were no bad habits to break because there were no habits at all. He learned left tackle in Year 1 and right tackle in Year 2, allowing him to develop value as a reserve NFL swing tackle.

This is different from Faalele, who has played exclusively right tackle. (His only time at a different position was a goal-line touchdown run in Minnesota’s bowl game.) Because he was behind the development curve for college, this allowed him to focus on a given position and play early. He started the final eight games as a freshman and remained in the lineup for 31 of 34 college games, save for the 2020 season. Faalele opted out because of COVID-19, concerned about contracting the illness at his size. He devoted the year to getting into better shape. Faalele dropped under 400 pounds. The biggest change? Replacing juice with water.

By Mailata’s third season in the NFL, he wanted people to stop looking at him as an experiment, as an Australian rugby player learning football, and just look at him as an offensive tackle. If he was beaten by a speed rusher, it wasn’t because he was still a relative novice. It was because he wasn’t doing his job correctly as a left tackle.

Faalele said he has recently felt the same way. By his senior year, he was finally viewed simply as a Minnesota offensive lineman instead of a newbie just learning football. At the Senior Bowl, Faalele knew he needed to work on his pad level, getting to the second level, having faster hands and using his length. These are the same types of things he’d need to improve on if he had played the position since Pop Warner.

NFL evaluators will be intrigued by Faalele’s potential, but they’re not drafting a story. They’re drafting a right tackle. His size, frame and power allow him to stymie pass rushers at the point of attack. He can improve his body angles — especially against speed rushers — but he has good, balanced footwork for someone his size.

Mailata actually thinks Faalele’s basketball background helps as an offensive lineman more than Mailata’s rugby background. He couldn’t think of a rugby skill that translated directly to left tackle, although he conceded the toughness and aggression required in rugby helps him. He instead sees how rebounding fundamentals from basketball can help in blocking.

If Mailata played a different position, though, it would be a different conversation. Faalele believes if the NFL started scouting Australia, it’s not necessarily offensive linemen they would find.

“There would be a lot of bigger running backs and tight ends,” Faalele said.

To this point, most of the Australia-to-the-NFL stories are about punters. Of the 19 players in NFL history born in Australia, 13 have been punters. Mailata hopes he and Faalele can be part of a movement to change the perception of American football in their homeland.

Here’s the complication: If there was a heavy concentration of 6-foot-8, 350-plus-pound athletes somewhere, the NFL would have found them. In fact, the SEC would probably beat them to it.

“We’re kind of one off-ish,” Mailata said. “We’re just two really big motherfuckers from the same country. They’re sprinkled in there. But I know there are a fucking ton of players, there are so many players down under and from the Polynesian countries that I know who can play this game that will be great players if they can spend time perfecting their craft. Or even if they want to go through … high school, (junior college), college.”

And that’s what Mailata hopes can be the lesson of the story. Mailata signed a four-year, $64 million contract before his 25th birthday. Faalele earned a scholarship, a college degree and will receive a seven-figure signing bonus in a few months at age 22. It would be playing on a cliche to say this is a childhood dream come true. They would have needed to know this even existed to dream it. But Mailata thinks about all the kids back home who could have a chance in football if they only knew more about the game and the avenues to pursue it.

Mailata has pondered how he could raise awareness, what programs could be created and what infrastructure is required. Sometimes a movement only needs a face — or two 6-foot-8 bodies combining for more than 700 pounds of mass.

“American football is still foreign waters in Australia,” Mailata said. “If we can create this pipeline and show Australia that this is a sport we’re good at, we have players who are actually killing it, you can actually make a difference here.”

(Top photo of Daniel Faalele: Dustin Bradford / Getty Images)