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Josh Weinfuss, ESPN Staff WriterNov 9, 2024, 06:00 AM ET
- Josh Weinfuss is a staff writer who covers the Arizona Cardinals and the NFL at ESPN. Josh has covered the Cardinals since 2012, joining ESPN in 2013. He is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America and a graduate of Indiana University. You can follow him via Twitter @joshweinfuss.
When Mark Dulgerian arrived in Munich, Germany, in June 2023, he needed to find a park.
The NFL’s lone international scout was in town to try out a German rugby player for the NFL’s International Pathway Program. As he did for all of his workouts, Dulgerian preferred to use a flat, grassy area to conduct a series of drills that would decide the player’s next steps.
Dulgerian had a problem, though: He had never been to Germany.
He scrolled through Google Maps, hoping to find a grassy area, preferably a soccer field. He quickly realized there were too many to choose from but settled on what looked on his screen like a swath of grass that he hoped would be suitable to put a player through a two-hour tryout. Unbeknownst to Dulgerian, the park he picked turned out to be the English Garden, Germany’s version of Central Park.
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For the next two hours, the smell of hops wafted over Dulgerian and the athlete as festive revelers gathered to watch the workout.
“It’s like, I’m in a beer garden and this guy could be playing for the New England Patriots in eight months,” Dulgerian said with a chuckle. “It’s crazy. It’s crazy to think that it’s his opportunity. As he’s going drill to drill with German music in the background, this could be his opportunity to make his first stamp of his journey in the NFL.”
This is Dulgerian’s life as he navigates four continents looking for international talent. He also identifies talent in Australia but isn’t on the ground to conduct tryouts in person.
While most scouts are confined to a region of the United States and evaluate athletes who have been playing football since they were in grade school, Dulgerian’s job is a bit different. His territory is Europe, Asia, South and Central America and the Caribbean. Former New York Giants star Osi Umenyiora leads the league’s efforts in Africa, while the NFL’s Australia office tries out prospective players on that continent.
For Dulgerian, he’s mostly evaluating athletes from other sports who he believes have the potential to play football.
Of the 14 players currently on NFL rosters whom Dulgerian scouted in the past two years as a part of the IPP, 13 are on practice squads. Offensive lineman Travis Clayton, who played rugby union in England, was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in the seventh round of the 2024 draft.
Wide receiver Praise Olatoke is one of the players, and his team, the Carolina Panthers, is set to take on the Giants on Sunday (9:30 a.m. ET, NFL Network) in Munich in the NFL’s final international game of the season.
Dulgerian’s role in a player’s journey is small but crucial: finding a prospect and making the initial evaluation. He’s usually the first or second point of contact for international players before they advance to the IPP, a program established in 2017 to discover, train and integrate athletes from around the world into American football and the NFL. For the first time this year, the NFL has expanded practice squads to include a 17th spot specifically reserved for international players.
If players advance to the IPP, Dulgerian hands them off to those in charge of that program, leaving him as a small steppingstone along their football journeys.
Through it all, Dulgerian has become a road warrior. He doesn’t check a bag. The most time zones he has had a meal in over a 24-hour span is five. He tries to do a lot of yoga, stay hydrated and take Airborne to preemptively ward off illnesses that could derail his marathon trips.
“He’s uniquely mastered the art of being everywhere at the same time,” said Kris Durham, the head of football at the NFL Academy who has worked closely with Dulgerian for the past few years. “He’s developed a real niche in terms of identifying talent in the world that doesn’t play our sport. It takes a special eye to really understand what teams are looking for, what we’re looking for and how … they relate to our sport.”
“He’s uniquely mastered the art of being everywhere at the same time,” said Kris Durham, the head of football at the NFL Academy who has worked closely with Dulgerian for the past few years. Courtesy of Mark Dulgerian
FROM THE TIME he started in 2022, Dulgerian has been on the road from August to October, conducting in-person tryouts for players he thinks might have a chance to be invited to the IPP. If chosen, they could receive a spot at the international combine, which could lead to a place in the intense, immersive 10-week program at IMG Academy in Florida. This past year, five specialists — punters and kickers — from the IPP participated in the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis, the first time the program sent any prospects to the combine.
“We’re trying to present an opportunity that not a lot of people know about,” Dulgerian said. “And we’re trying to connect this opportunity with athletes who qualify, but athletes who have always wanted this opportunity and just never knew how to do it.”
Before Dulgerian took the first flight of his busy season, he estimated he put in about 1,000 hours of research from February to July, collecting data and watching countless hours of film, usually on social media.
He scours databases and rosters of sports he knows such as basketball, and others he’s figuring out the nuances of, such as rugby. Dulgerian also has looked at Gaelic football — which he described as a mix of rugby, basketball and soccer — and Australian rules football — a modified version of rugby.
The result was an initial list of 10,000 prospects this cycle. Of those, 6,000 were found through Dulgerian’s own research.
Dulgerian finds prospects from all athletic fields. When the Olympics were on TV, he watched for fun and work. It resulted in Dulgerian reaching out to athletes in rugby, handball, basketball and track and field. A few of those track and field athletes tried out at the NFL’s International Combine, which took place Oct. 9-12 at the NFL Academy at Loughborough University, north of London. Dulgerian said most of the Olympians he has talked with have been receptive to trying football but have told him the timing has to be right.
The other 4,000 on Dulgerian’s list are found through his network of around 1,000 agents, coaches and trainers around the world, as well as from tips.
As Dulgerian trims his list, his initial criteria are age and size: 20- to 24-year-olds who are at least 6-foot-4. This year, there were only about 900 players, about his annual average, who fit both categories.
“He’s living in a different mind space,” said Eric Galko, who hired Dulgerian as one of the first employees at his scouting company, Optimum Scouting, in 2008. “To be able to handle how you translate what he’s watching to an NFL player and seeing that it may be three, four, five years down the line or three, four months down the line depending on his evaluation, too. It’s probably a really complex thought process, for sure.”
Once he breaks down film on his pool of athletes, Dulgerian reduces his list to 160-200 athletes and contacts them.
Most of Dulgerian’s contact with potential prospects comes from his IPP-specific Instagram account. The messages are general in nature: “Would you be interested in football?”
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More times than not, he won’t get a response. At first, he was baffled.
“It’s egotistical to think that everybody would just drop what they’re doing because ‘Oh, shoot the NFL’s here now,'” Dulgerian said. “They eventually do need to fall in love with the sport, but to think that as soon as we start those conversations that they’re in love with it already, it’s stupid. It’s not been a part of their life like it has been here.”
There are other roadblocks, such as language barriers and being under contract in another sport.
Last year, of the prospects he contacted, Dulgerian worked out 30-40. Of those, 13 were invited to the international combine.
“Mark’s role within that, sort of being from the very, very top of the funnel on down throughout the rest of the process, is just instrumental because you got to start somewhere and you got to cast that broad net,” said Pat Long, director of international football development at the NFL. “You got to canvass the globe truly and literally.”
Dulgerian puts in about 1,000 hours of research from February to July looking for international prospects. Courtesy of Mark Dulgerian
BACK IN AUGUST, Dulgerian called Durham from hot and humid Jamaica to say he had found a potential prospect.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing in Jamaica?'” Durham recalled.
“I was like, ‘Is he a sprinter?’ He’s like, ‘No, he’s actually a thrower.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ So I was like, Mark is really turning over every rock.”
His trip to Jamaica was “eye-opening,” Dulgerian said. He felt a formidable buzz on the island about the NFL being in town to scout, which locals looked at as another path for athletes in addition to track and field.
Most of his trips produce a story. Jamaica was no different. He wrote his scouting report in a sweltering non-air-conditioned airport as a hurricane was approaching. It was a drastic contrast to the time he wrote a report on a rooftop in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background.
There was the time he needed to measure the height of a rugby player he was trying out while staying at a small hotel attached to an Irish pub in a “really small town” in northern Europe. Dulgerian has learned not to rely on basic measurements given to him by athletes or teams. They tend to be skewed, which is why he carries his own measuring tape.
He looked around the quiet lobby of his hotel and decided he couldn’t do it there, so he measured the athlete in the hallway next to his room by taping a piece of paper from the notepad in his room onto the hallway wall as patrons of the Irish pub passed by. The 5-foot-10 Dulgerian needed to drag the sofa from his room into the hallway so he could stand on it and get the right measurements. And the guy was “tall, tall,” Dulgerian remembered.
“It’s not ideal,” Dulgerian said with a laugh. “The freaking NFL, a billion-dollar industry, and I’m taking this guy’s height right outside my hotel room door.
“That was a little awkward. It’s a lot of just kind of figuring out ways to do things.”
For some prospects like Carolina’s Olatoke, Dulgerian serves as their guide to the NFL. Olatoke’s path was more unconventional than most. He was a sprinter in Scotland but played club football at Ohio State after transferring there from Trinity Western University in Canada to run track. Then, Dulgerian helped him on his path to the NFL, checking in on him periodically, asking for video updates and encouraging him throughout.
Dulgerian’s workout of Olatoke included “a lot” of football drills, catching and running. Dulgerian put him through a mock combine, according to Olatoke.
“He’s been good,” Olatoke said. “He supports me, like reposts stuff I post about football and this and that. I know he’s doing a lot trying to grow the game.”
The NFL’s growth around the world in both popularity and participation has also helped Dulgerian do his job. There are 74 countries with football federations across North America, South America, Central America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, according to the International Federation of American Football.
In two years, he’ll have taken nine scouting trips that have taken him from his home base of Los Angeles to Austria, France, Finland, Jamaica, Estonia and the Netherlands, usually with multiple stops in each country. His longest itinerary this year was Los Angeles to Paris to London to Tallinn, Estonia, to Amsterdam to Dusseldorf, Germany, to Munich and back to Los Angeles.
This year he’ll spend 24 nights in a hotel, fly on 18 airplanes and take seven trains, plus too many cabs and rideshares to count.
“We want to invest our resources and our time in guys that have a legitimate NFL chance and a legitimate NFL shot,” Dulgerian said. “So, each year we’re trying to do better and better to really get the right guys in the selection process but also do our due diligence just in case maybe there’s something we didn’t see just on the film.”
