Three players in NFL international program can be drafted, Louis Rees-Zammit is a free agent

The Chiefs are expected to sign Welsh rugby star Louis Rees-Zammit, a participant in the NFL’s International Player Pathway program. But not each participant in that program can signal proper now.

Three players in the International Player Pathway program are eligible to be chosen in the 2024 NFL draft, and can solely signal with groups in the event that they go undrafted.

The league workplace tells PFT that Rees-Zammit is a free agent as a result of he didn’t attend school and is greater than 4 years faraway from highschool (or his highschool equal). He technically might have been drafted throughout his fourth yr out of highschool, though at the moment he had by no means expressed any curiosity in quitting rugby for the NFL and there was no cause for any staff to think about drafting him.

Eagles offensive deal with Jordan Mailata is, like Rees-Zammit, an international rugby participant who determined to hitch the NFL’s International Player Pathway program. But Mailata was eligible for the draft in 2018, when the Eagles took him in the seventh spherical. That’s as a result of the yr he entered the NFL’s International Player Pathway program occurred to be his fourth yr out of highschool.

Travis Clayton of England, Bayron Matos of the Dominican Republic and Jotham Russell of Australia are the three players in this yr’s International Player Pathway program who’re in their fourth years out of highschool, so these three all might be drafted. The different players in the program are, like Rees-Zammit, free brokers.

Although NFL follow squads are restricted to 16 players, the league will grant a seventeenth follow squad spot to any NFL staff that indicators a participant from the International Player Pathway program and places him on the follow squad. It’s possible that a number of players from the program will be on follow squads in 2024. Rees-Zammit, who has been the most-discussed participant from the program, could even make the Chiefs’ energetic roster.