Uar Bernard has never played a down of organized football.
The Philadelphia Eagles drafted him anyway.
That is not a typo. With the 251st overall pick in the seventh round of the 2026 NFL Draft, the Eagles selected Bernard, a defensive lineman from Nigeria whose football résumé is almost empty, but whose athletic résumé is hard to ignore.
Bernard came to American football through a regional camp in Africa before being selected for the NFL’s International Player Pathway program, which was created in 2017 to find and develop players from outside the United States.
Now, he is headed to Philadelphia, where he will try to follow one of the best examples the program has ever produced: Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata.
Mailata arrived in the NFL from Australia with no college football experience. He has since become one of the league’s top offensive linemen. For Bernard, that means one of the sport’s rarest success stories will be standing across from him at practice.
“It’s a dream come true for me because I’ve worked hard for this,” Bernard said Saturday after being drafted. “I’ve not played football, but I’ve gone through some drills that made me believe that I’m going to get better every day. I thank God for everything. I thank God for life. I thank God for the opportunities he’s given to me to be drafted by the Eagles.”
The Eagles are not pretending Bernard is ready-made. He is raw in the truest sense. But at 1.93 metres and 139 kilograms, he has the kind of movement skills teams usually spend years trying to find.
At the HBCU Showcase and IPP Pro Day, Bernard set multiple HBCU combine records. He ran the 36.6-metre dash in 4.63 seconds, posted a 99-centimetre vertical jump and recorded a 3.30-metre broad jump. All were the best marks in the event’s history by a player weighing more than 136 kilograms.
That combination made him one of two IPP prospects selected in the 2026 draft, along with Miami Dolphins tight end Seydou Traore. The difference is Traore played college football at Arkansas State and Mississippi State.
Bernard is starting from the beginning.
Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said the team knew exactly what it was taking on.
“We wanted to take the chance on the kid,” Roseman said. “Obviously, we’ve had great success with that program. We spent a lot of time with him. (Defensive line) coach (Clint) Hurtt went down there and spent the day with him, worked him out. You know, just for us, it was a passion project. Obviously, he’s got a lot of tools in his body. Understand it’s going to take time. It’s going to take a lot of time here. But it was pretty cool. We spent a lot of time talking about unusual, you know, and certainly unusual with that guy.”
Bernard now joins a defensive line room that already includes powerful young players such as Jordan Davis and Jalen Carter. Defensive line coach Clint Hurtt, defensive coordinator Vic Fangio and head coach Nick Sirianni will be part of the group trying to turn Bernard’s rare athletic ability into football skill.
For the Eagles, it is a long-term bet.
For Bernard, it is already history.
He said being drafted means something bigger because of where he comes from and who may be watching back home.
“It [means] a whole lot to me because I’m the first from my tribe to be at this level of NFL,” Bernard said. “So, more like an ambassador to the youth back home. And bearing the flag of Nigeria is a big task for me to work hard and give an example for the youth, for the young guys coming up from Nigeria.”
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