By Ten years ago, Jordan Mailata watched the Super Bowl for the first time. The then-17-year-old only cared about one thing: the halftime show.
“I only watched the halftime performance because that’s all I knew about the Super Bowl,” he said Tuesday.
American football was a far-flung thing back then for the Australian who had dreams of becoming a rugby star. But much like the Sydney native, life can be funny.
Two years after that Beyoncé-led halftime show, Mailata – a 6-foot-8-inch, 365-pound behemoth – decided to trade professional rugby for professional football, uprooting his life and taking a chance on a game that he never played on the other side of the world.
Now, in 2025, he’s what Philadelphia Eagles offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland calls “the greatest story in football.”
Now in his seventh season, Mailata is one of the most important parts of the best offensive line in the sport. He signed a three-year, $66 million contract extension ahead of the 2024 season and is a key cog in the machine that helped Eagles running back Saquon Barkley run for more than 2,000 yards this season – the ninth player ever to reach that benchmark.
Considering the first ever down of football he ever played came in the NFL, the 27-year-old Mailata is still blown away that all of this – the games in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans, the bright lights of the Super Bowl, the appearance on “The Masked Singer,” the Christmas albums he’s recorded with his teammates – is real.
“I cannot believe how far I’ve come. I can’t believe I’m still here. I can’t believe I’m sitting at this desk with you guys right now at my second Super Bowl,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “Hopefully, we can finish the job.”
Professional athletes don’t exactly just wake up one day and find themselves playing sports at the highest level. There are years of hard work, sacrifices, blood, sweat and tears that lay the foundation for just the chance to get to the top level of the game.
Mailata was always willing to do that. He just thought it would be for the chance to play rugby.
Mailata did whatever he could do to pay the bills while he pursued his dream of playing rugby at a high level. He worked at McDonald’s and supermarket chain Woolworth’s, doing demolition work – anything that would put some money in his pocket while he worked on his chosen trade. There was just one problem: he’s massive.
The constant running that rugby demands can wear out a big guy like Mailata. He could run through people like no one else, but he was used as a substitute who could bring extra power in the final minutes of a match.
Rugby’s loss was football’s gain – the skills Mailata learned on the pitch made him a veritable unicorn of an offensive lineman. But he still had to make the decision – against his family’s wishes, at first – to move to a whole different hemisphere to play a game that he had barely heard of.
“I was 20 years old when I made the decision to come here,” Mailata said. “I thought, if it doesn’t work out, it’s enough to just go back to my odd jobs and chasing my rugby dreams, but that’s really all it was, and I couldn’t have done it without my family. (They were) a little hesitant at first and the idea, but they came around, and they’ve supported me and they’ve always made sure that I have somewhere to fall if everything were to fail, and that’s probably a big part of my success.”
Mailata joined the NFL’s International Player Pathway program and moved to the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, to get a crash course in football in 2017. The 10-week program teaches international players the ins and outs of the game, on the field and in the classroom, and gives them an opportunity to make an NFL roster.
The big Aussie was a raw talent when he got to Florida. But when Stoutland saw him in a workout, he knew Mailata was special.
The longtime Eagles offensive line coach was initially reluctant to make the trip down to Florida to watch Mailata work out – he was supposed to go on a golf trip with childhood friends in some of the rare downtime afforded to an NFL coach – and repeatedly said he wasn’t going down to scout a prospect.
“I’m like, ‘Nope, I’m on vacation. I’m going with my friends on this (trip).’ … I said, ‘Howie, I cannot do that,’” Stoutland said, relaying a conversation he had with Eagles executive vice president Howie Roseman. “Anyway, I did it. Greatest decision I ever made, other than marrying my wife, was to go there for that workout.”
At the time though, all Stoutland knew was that he was going to watch a rugby player go through football drills.
“I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ And all of a sudden, we started working … and this giant guy, all these drills that I put aside, … he would be flying through the cones. And it’d be like, zoom! I’d be like, ‘Oh my God.’ I didn’t show that expression to him because there was another team there at the time, and I didn’t want them to see my passion for him. I wanted to downplay it.”
“And boy, oh boy, I got out of that workout and I called Howie on the phone, and I was like, ‘Oh. My. God. Now, this guy has no idea, he doesn’t know if a football is stuffed or blown up with air, like he doesn’t know how to put his hand on the ground, but the future is bright. Let me get my hands on this guy,’ and the rest is kind of history.”
Mailata was drafted in the seventh round of the 2018 NFL Draft. He played in his first football game in the preseason just four months later.
“I just hope the guys in IPP program just – you’re going to face a lot of adversity, you’re going to face a lot of hurdles, and I just want them to learn how to jump over those hurdles, or, you know, breakthrough that adversity,” Mailata said of his journey to the league.
“Because it’s not easy. This isn’t easy. It’s, you know, it’s, I don’t know how I’m here. I’m just, kind of, grateful for the people who backed me and supported me, and they gotta find the strength to push through that adversity once they face it.”
Seven years down the road and Mailata has lived up to what Stoutland saw in that workout – and more.
“This is a guy – never having played football, being able to come in the league and within seven years, establish himself as, I believe, one of the best – if not the best – left tackles in the game right now,” said Landon Dickerson, Mailata’s fellow offensive lineman who has become his best friend. “You know, people don’t really understand, right? A lot of us, we start playing football at four or five years old, so by the time you get to the league, you’ve had 16, 17 years of experience.
He added: “The ability that he had to be able to come in and start from nothing and learn and become what he’s become is extremely impressive. Regardless of whatever sport you look at, you can go take his story and put it into any sport that becomes – you know, it’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
Mailata has embraced everything about the game, from tailgating to trash-talking. When a reporter asked him about being “so far from home,” he responded, “Philadelphia’s only three hours away, mate.”
That embrace of the game, its culture and the grind of the NFL season has led to exponential growth over the last few seasons. The differences between the games are stark, he says – “rugby is a little bit more free-flowing, you can make plays on the run, but football is very stop-start” – but one thing translates over perfectly: hitting people.
“There’s no difference, they hit the same,” Mailata said. “I’m being serious. Like, the hits are the same. So yeah, I’m just saying – you wear padding, but it doesn’t help you at all. It does not – the helmet and pads don’t save you from anything.”
Eagles offensive lineman Lane Johnson said that once Mailata had a few years of learning under his belt, his work paid off.
“He’s always happy, he’s always eager to learn. And he put his time in,” Johnson said. “The good thing about when we got Jordan, he didn’t have a lot of bad habits. After a few years, he was ready to roll.
“He’s just been a dominant player because nobody has his size and speed to be able to do what he can do for his size.”
Mailata didn’t play a game in the regular season until 2020, spending two years on the bench learning his trade. He’s played at least 65% of the team’s snaps ever since, making 77 starts between the regular season and playoffs.
“It was a grind for a few years, and then all of a sudden, one day – I mean it now – the light came on. And he became confident in his knowledge,” Stoutland said.
“I don’t think there’s ever a top to this, that’s what’s so cool. Most players you coach, they played Pop Warner, they played high school football, they played college football, and so they get to this level and they’re done, they’re tapped out. I don’t, I don’t know. It’s cool,” Stoutland added.
