Max Iheanachor was born in Nigeria. He was a soccer goalie.<\/p>\n
He didn’t play American football until he was in junior college.<\/p>\n
He’s now a first-round pick.<\/p>\n
The Pittsburgh Steelers<\/a> chose him with the No. 21 overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft on Thursday out of Arizona State.<\/p>\n What a journey.<\/p>\n 2026 NFL DRAFT HQ:\u00a0Live tracker<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Pick-by-pick grades<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Best players still available<\/a><\/p>\n How Max Iheanachor became NFL player<\/p>\n The 6-foot-6, 321-pound Iheanachor always had a possible football future, but he had to make it to the sport.<\/p>\n “The journey for Big Max is unique,” NFL.com draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah told Bill Bender of The Sporting News<\/a>. “When you come over to the country at age 13 \u2014 when you don’t play high school football, you’re a basketball player and then you go off to junior college and just embrace the sport. Just look at a short period of time for him to be positioned where he is right now.”<\/p>\n BEST DRAFT NAMES:\u00a0Ephesians Prysock<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0R Mason Thomas<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0DeVonta Smith<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Zxavian Harris<\/a><\/p>\n He’s an incredible athlete. He ran a 4.91-second 40-yard dash.<\/p>\n He built his athleticism elsewhere. His high school didn’t even have football.<\/p>\n Iheanachor began his college career at East Los Angeles Community College.<\/p>\n From all those stops, now into the NFL.<\/p>\n More NFL Draft news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Iheanachor was born in Nigeria. He was a soccer goalie. He didn’t play American football until he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-624619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}