LA Rams reach to Italy for their next offensive lineman

The news was announced Tuesday that the LA Rams have just added an offensive tackle named Max Pircher from Italy to their 90-man roster via a special program known as the NFL’s International Player Pathway Program.  It’s a program that’s actually been around since 2017 designed to provide, well, a path for international athletes to play in the NFL.

It kinda’  strikes me as an NFL player internship program.

More specifically, that path comes in the form of what the NFL calls their International Player Pathway Program and assigns international players of American football (as opposed to football which is the American sport of soccer).  At the conclusion of preseason training camp, each player will be eligible for an international player practice squad exemption with his assigned team.

This provides the assigned team an additional practice squad member for the season  In effect, this gives the Rams an extra practice squad roster slot who is an international player who is also ineligible to be activated this season. Pircher must be carried by the team on its team roster until the end of training camp.

The 6-foot-7, 300-pound Pircher is one of four international players who are destined to join NFC West teams in 2021. Each year, the division that gets to accept the international players is chosen by a random draw.

Benvenuto a Los Angeles Max Pircher!

The Rams will carry Pircher on their roster until the end of training camp. That’s part of the requirement of this special path to the NFL. Obviously, the NFL is attempting to market its product, the game itself, globally. And the way to do that is to involve the hometown favorites of nations abroad.

And no, they aren’t all kickers, in case you were wondering about that.

Maximillian Pircher, like any newcomer to the NFL, harbors a dream of playing in the NFL someday. The 21-year old native of Bressanone, Italy, a town nestled among the Italian Alps, was more interested in playing handball than American Football. But a funny thing happened along the way. Swarco offensive line coach Lee Rowland saw him at the annual team tryouts and saw offensive lineman written all over him:

"““I went there to the rookie camps they are making every year to give everybody the possibility to play football at least in the second team. Lee Rowland came to me already after the second practice we had at the camp and gave me the possibility to workout with him. He worked out with me every day and explained me the game” – Maximillian Pircher as interviewed by AmericanFootballInternational.com’s Alex Malchow"

The rest is history.

The other three players chosen for the path are: LB Aaron Donkor, from Germany, to join the Seattle Seahawks; TE Berhard Seikovits, from Austria, to join the Arizona Cardinals and OL Alfredo Gutierrez, from Mexico,  to join the San Francisco 49ers.

Most importantly for Rams fans, however, just how much do we know about Pircher? Well, not a whole lot. We don’t even know if he will count against the LA Rams 90-man roster limit?  But what we do know is that he becomes the latest new face for the LA Rams rookie debut of offensive line coach Kevin Carberry. So he will be learning the NFL offensive line skillsets from the latest hire.

While he has the right body size and shape, there is not a single video to be found on this guy, and the reality is that he will likely be learning his NFL football craft from a lower point on the learning curve. Of course, it’s all conjecture at this point because he is so new and we have nothing to go on. But we do know this. He’s a behemoth in size. So there’s that.

Birthplace-less bio

According to a press release put out by the NFL which included a short bio of the four players, it was after attending a Swarco Raiders football game that the football bug bit Pircher. The Swarco Raiders are an American football team based in Innsbruck, Austria. Pircher was motivated to try out for the same team that introduced him to the game of football. He tested out other positions – tight end and defensive end- before settling on the offensive line.

Los Angeles Rams

During the 2019 season, Pircher was named the starting right tackle for the Swarco Raiders and also played on the Italian National Team, nicknamed the Blue Team. The team has been mildly successful, having won the European (American football) championship twice, and been runner up three times.

Pircher has since moved on to play for the Hildesheim Invaders in Germany, where he balances (juggles?) playing football and attending school.

The Hildesheim Invaders are an American football team (from Hildesheim, Germany, natch) that plays in what is known as the German Football League.

The club’s greatest success has been its promotion to the American football Bundesliga (which is really confusing because that is what the German professional soccer league is called, the Bundesliga), now the German Football League, or GFL. The team has been around since 1983.

COVID casualty as well

There was no football season in 2020 due to Covid, but in 2019, the Invaders had a  10-4 season and lost in the quarterfinals (what Europeans call their playoffs, I assume) to a team called the Frankfurt Universe.

Each of the four players got additional training alongside NFL players and draft prospects at IMG Academy in Florida this past winter, according to a release from the league office. The IMG Academy is a preparatory boarding school and sports training destination in Bradenton, Florida

The pre-training camp training is to ensure that all incoming athletes are within the scope of NFL athleticism, know the rules and responsibilities of their intended position and can enter the regular NFL football camp knowing what to expect.  The IMG Academy also provides ESL training or English as a Second Language

Just as an aside, they got some off-the-wall team names in this GFL –  The Marburg Mercenaries, the Stuttgart Scorpions, the Cologne Crocodiles, the Berlin Rebels, the Schwabisch-Hall Unicorns, the Allgau Comets.

I think it’s safe to say the level of play is probably a notch or two below the Canadian Football League, commonly known as the CFL.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but hear the dulcet tones of the golden voice of legendary NFL broadcaster John Facenda in my ear saying, “Canadian Football. . .  as if that matters.”