April 26, (THEWILL) — Uar Bernard prepared for the National Football League by watching pass-rush tutorials on YouTube and using tree trunks as resistance equipment in a Nigerian village where most people make their living from the land. He had never played an organised American football match in his life. In March, at the HBCU combine in the United States, he ran 40 yards in 4.63 seconds, jumped 39 inches vertically, and broad-jumped 10 feet 10 inches, breaking records in all three categories and drawing immediate interest from NFL franchises. Bernard is 22, stands six feet four inches, weighs 306 pounds, and speaks four languages. He is also one of five Nigerians selected for the NFL’s International Player Pathway class of 2026, a figure that amounts to nearly 40 per cent of the entire global intake. That Nigeria, a country without a functioning domestic American football league, should supply close to half of the world’s most competitive talent identification programme in a single year is a story that raises as many questions as it answers.
The programme was established in 2017 on a straightforward premise: identify athletes from outside the United States with elite physical traits, place them in an intensive training environment, and allow teams to carry them on practice squads without using a standard roster spot. Selected players undergo 10 weeks of coaching at a facility in Fort Myers, Florida, combining field sessions with classroom work on playbooks and positional technique. The camp concludes with a pro day, where NFL scouts assess progress. An international exemption rule, which grants each franchise an additional practice squad place specifically for pathway participants, has made the scheme increasingly attractive to clubs willing to take a chance on raw prospects who would otherwise never enter the system.
Of the 13 athletes selected for the 2026 class, five are Nigerian: Collins Arogunjo, Bernard, Michael Daramola, Chibuike Madu, and Anjola Oketola. Their routes into the programme reflect the variety of athletic backgrounds that Nigeria’s talent pool contains. Arogunjo and Oketola transitioned from rugby, with Arogunjo studying at the University of Lagos. Daramola and Madu are linked to activities within Nigeria, Madu notably through basketball and competition in Abuja. None of them arrived in Florida having come through anything resembling a conventional American football pathway.
Bernard’s journey is the most documented and, in many ways, the most instructive. He took up basketball at 16 before a coach redirected him towards American football. He passed through a regional camp, earned an invitation to the 2024 NFL Nigeria event in Lagos, and subsequently attended the NFL Africa camp in Cairo in 2025, where he secured his place in the 2026 class. His preparation, combining YouTube film study with improvised resistance training in a farming village, reads like a detail from a screenplay. The combine numbers, however, were entirely real, and so was the attention they generated from NFL front offices ahead of the draft.
Credit for building the Nigerian pipeline belongs in significant part to Osi Umenyiora, the former NFL defensive end who serves as the league’s lead ambassador for Africa. The 2024 Lagos camp included a three-day talent identification event and flag football sessions drawing prospects from across the continent. Combined with the work of the American Football Association of Nigeria in organising school-level activities in Lagos, Abuja, and other cities, these efforts have established at least the outline of a domestic feeder structure. Yet the outline is all it is. What exists is a network of sporadic interventions rather than a coherent national framework, and the distinction matters enormously when assessing how sustainable this momentum really is.
The contrast with other participating nations is revealing. Australia benefits from rugby union and rugby league, sports that share physical demands and tactical patterns with American football. European nations have more organised domestic competitions and established coaching networks. Nigerian athletes arrive in Florida having cleared a significantly higher structural barrier, which makes their performance at pro days all the more striking when it comes. The 10-week Fort Myers camp compresses years of development into weeks, placing enormous pressure on adaptability and learning speed. For players whose technical grounding in the sport is, at best, foundational, that compression is the central challenge.
The diaspora dimension complicates any simple reading of what Nigerian representation in this programme actually means. Players of Nigerian descent who were raised and trained abroad, figures such as Efe Obada, who developed in Britain and the United States, have historically not faced the same technical deficit. Their success in the NFL, often cited in discussions about African representation in the league, is built on an entirely different foundation. For the five members of the 2026 class, the transition involves adapting simultaneously to a new sport, a new country, and an entirely new competitive standard within a matter of months. The human cost of that adjustment, the distance from family, the uncertainty of outcome, the daily scrutiny of film sessions comparing their movements against professional benchmarks, runs through every individual story in this group.
The programme’s overall success rate provides necessary context for the optimism that surrounds Nigeria’s growing presence. Across the years since 2017, while dozens of players have been allocated to teams, only a small number have established sustained NFL careers. Many spend time on practice squads, training with clubs but not appearing in regular season games. Fewer still reach active rosters, and a smaller number again become consistent contributors. Previous Nigerian participants, including CJ Okoye and Haggai Ndubuisi, demonstrated that the pathway can lead to genuine professional opportunity. Whether it leads there consistently, and for how many, is a different question.
What the selection of five Nigerian athletes in a single year’s intake ultimately demonstrates is the efficiency of the current scouting network and the scale of the country’s raw athletic potential.
The route from Lagos to an NFL locker room still runs almost entirely through external structures, from identification to development to final evaluation. Some accounts of this cohort present the five selections with uncomplicated optimism, pointing to the growing credibility of American football among Nigerian youth and the possibility that their progress will encourage domestic investment in infrastructure. That may yet prove correct. A more measured reading recognises that individual breakthroughs have a poor record of producing systemic change without deliberate and sustained commitment from within. Until investment in coaching education, organised competition, and dedicated facilities matches the ambition of individuals such as Bernard, Nigeria will remain a supplier of potential rather than a developer of professionals. That distinction matters deeply, and it is one that the five men currently training in Fort Myers are doing nothing less than living in real time.
Jude Obafemi, THEWILL
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
