PHOENIX – The champions of the NFL’s 2022 season will be determined when the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles meet in Super Bowl 57.
But as two evenly matched squads prepare to clash, another debate was “settled” in the days before Super Sunday: What is the tougher sport, football or rugby?
No less an authority than Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata, who played professional rugby growing up in Australia, weighed in when asked about the sports’ fundamental distinctions.
“Everything. Physically, mentally, the playbook, learning the techniques. I think the difference between the two sports – I would say rugby is such a free-flowing sport, right? And we know how many (play) stoppages there are in a football game,” he said.
“There’s so much technique involved in (football) – it’s an absolute chess match – if you step 6 inches too far, you could ruin the play. To me, just from my experience, I really do believe that football is a lot harder than rugby.”
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Mailata then broke into his signature laugh, knowing several Aussie media members surrounded him.
“But don’t come at me now,” he added. “You’ve got to give (football) a try, then we’ll talk.”
Mailata, 25, gave football a try five years ago, a decision that changed his life.
After seeing this outsized man move about a rugby field, NFL scouts invited Mailata to participate in the league’s International Player Pathway Program, which identifies prospects outside the U.S. and Canada. He trained at Florida’s IMG Academy in 2018 while performing at various pre-draft workouts. Mailata said he felt like a “guinea pig” in what he described as a “rigorous” curriculum. He and the other international players had to bike around IMG while prospects headed for that year’s scouting combine in Indianapolis were driven about in golf carts.
“That was great motivation to try and beat them to the next place,” said Mailata.
But his athleticism and size – Mailata is now one of the most imposing players in the league at 6-8 and 365 pounds – impressed the Eagles enough to invest a seventh-round pick in him that year.
He landed on injured reserve his first two seasons, never appearing in a game as he continued to learn football’s nuances. But by 2020, Mailata had progressed so far that he became a starter at one of the game’s premier positions.
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“My mindset every day was to get 1% better,” said Mailata, who was ranked as the NFL’s fifth-best left tackle in 2022 by the analytics website Pro Football Focus.
“I think the hardest thing that I had to overcome were the expectations – I had none (by others), but I thought I did. And you have to go in here trying to get better every day. Well how do you do that?
“For me, my biggest goal that I took away from the international program, was that being an international player, I had to work two times harder than an American player.”
So that’s what Mailata did, staying late after practice routinely while committing himself to the tutelage of veteran Philadelphia offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland, who became something of a personal guru.
“So the first time I meet him, I know he’s a rugby player. I don’t know if he can play football,” Stoutland told USA TODAY Sports when asked about Mailata’s journey. “I work him out, and I get very excited. I look at opportunities. Mr. Lurie (Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie) would always tell me, ‘Don’t look at now – look down the road two, three years and kinda visualize what this player could be.’ And that’s helpful.
“The player has to have certain characteristics you’re looking for. And when they start stacking up, you say, ‘Hmm, we might have something here.’ And then you have to evaluate the ability to learn all the stuff that he’s got to learn.
“There’s a lot that went into that.”
And Mailata was a willing pupil, soaking up Stoutland’s wisdom while taking crash courses in everything from football terminology to the basic parts of offensive line play down to its intricacies.
Mailata steadily improved.
“He’s been probably one of the most influential coaches I’ve ever had in my life,” Mailata said of Stoutland. “But in critical moments of my career, he was always there to either pick me up or bring me back down again, and he’s taught me so much. He’s taught me everything I need to know – how to play the position, how to be a good person, how to be a great teammate.”
It’s worked.
“What I really admire about Jordan, he’s like a protector in many ways,” said Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni. “Like, that’s his job to protect the quarterback. And then it’s just the way he is as a teammate – he protects his teammates, he loves his teammates, he fights for his teammates. So, super important to this team.
“Guys love him, he’s a heckuva football player.”
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And it doesn’t hurt when you can model your game after fellow blockers who are All-Pros multiple times over in center Jason Kelce, right tackle Lane Johnson and former Eagle Jason Peters, Mailata’s predecessor on the blind side.
“His path is very unique. I don’t know of any other players that have ever really done this. For him to go from where he was when he initially got here to where he is now – it’s cool to see,” Johnson told USA TODAY Sports. “I think he’s just now scratching the surface of what he’s going to become.
“Nobody can really compete with a guy that can move that fast and is that big.”
It’s also pretty hard to compete with Mailata’s outgoing personality, which parallels his huge frame and includes quite the voice.
“Auto-tune has helped my career,” he joked Wednesday.
Yet he provided quite a performance on the recently released “A Philly Special Christmas,” which included Johnson and Kelce.
“For me, I’ve always known that I can sing,” Mailata told the USA TODAY Network in December, adding: “So when people come up to me and say they’re shocked, I just feel like saying: ‘You should hear me when I’m drunk; I’m even better.’ “
Now the goal is to continue getting better at football. Mailata adheres to Stoutland’s advice by not buying into all the recent praise showered on him, like the attention he received for shutting down San Francisco 49ers pass rusher and 2022 NFL Defensive Player of the Year Nick Bosa in the NFC championship game.
“It’s like taking poison,” Mailata says of such compliments
And Stoutland knows his pupil still has plenty to learn and inconsistencies to negate.
“He’s still a young guy who hasn’t played all that many games,” he said. “I think that’s where his ceiling can really develop and improve from playing the game more, experiencing the situations more.
“I’ve already seen that this year, things that happened to him, maybe he got beat. Next time around, he’s aware of it, and now he reacts faster.”
As for advice to aspiring NFL stars, especially those coming from an atypical background like rugby? Mailata offered some.
“If you’re going to do it, man, go all out,” he said. “Don’t have a Plan B. Just give it everything you’ve got, because it’s not easy. You’re not going to pick it up in a year – I certainly didn’t.”
But after emerging from that pre-draft scrum in 2018, seems like Mailata’s got a pretty good grasp of things heading into the biggest game of his life.
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Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Nate Davis on Twitter @ByNateDavis.
