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NFL Africa ambassador Osi Umenyiora says the Chiefs’ Chu Godrick and Raiders’ David Agoha are ready to play in regular NFL games, despite only learning the game in the past three years. (0:38)
Two-time Super Bowl champion and NFL ambassador Osi Umenyiora confirmed to ESPN that there will be a NFL camp in Lagos, Nigeria this year, to scout talent for the NFL Academy and IPP Programme.
Umenyiora, who is the NFL’s lead ambassador in Africa and has fronted camps for the NFL in Ghana and Kenya, stopped short of naming a date. However, he confirmed that Lagos was next on the horizon, having previously scouted there for his own Uprise program.
“Yes, absolutely – we do [plan to host a camp in Africa this year]. I think Lagos, Nigeria, is the next place that we’re going to have a camp. Don’t know the date yet, but I can say with some degree of certainty that we’re going to have a camp in Nigeria,” Umenyiora told ESPN.
Umenyiora, who won Super Bowl XLII and XLVI with the New York Giants before finishing his playing career with the Atlanta Falcons, co-founded The Uprise with fellow Nigerian and former basketball star Ejike Ugboaja in 2020.
He has since been scouting talent for the NFL, although the league officially began holding camps in Africa two years later as many of the top Uprise talents attended the NFL Africa Touchdown camp in Ghana, hosted at the prestigious Right to Dream Academy.
It is little surprise that he plans to focus on Lagos next, as the two African International Player Pathway (IPP) players who he singled out as being ready for NFL action – Chukwuebuka Godrick (Kansas City Chiefs) and David Ebuka Agoha (Las Vegas Raiders) were both training there when Umenyiora recruited them.
Godrick and Agoha were two of six Nigerian players who spent the past season with NFL teams as part of the IPP Program – along with France’s Junior Aho and Italy’s Max Pircher.
Many players impressed in pre-season and Godrick got to spend his year with the Super Bowl-winning Chiefs, but it remains to be seen whether or not they can break into their respective teams and earn regular season snaps.
According to Umenyiora, Godrick and Agoha are ready to make the leap after impressing their teams since allocation.
He said: “I think there’s a couple of them that are [NFL ready]. From what I understand, my boy David Agoha has developed very rapidly and they like him there [at the Raiders] quite a bit. I know Chu has developed very rapidly and they like him there quite a bit too. I would expect to see both of them, at least, playing this year.
“The other ones – I haven’t heard from the teams. I’ve heard from the players themselves and they say they’re doing better; they’re getting there – but the other ones, Chu and David; I’ve heard from the teams [that] they’ve developed very fast.”
The IPP Program caters to international athletes transitioning to American football as young adults, but for those who show promise at a young enough age to get scouted for college, the NFL Academy in Loughborough becomes home.
Two of the academy’s brightest College products – Oklahoma’s Daniel Akinkunmi and Tennessee’s Emmanuel Okoye – both have links to Nigeria. Akinkunmi is British-Nigerian, while Okoye was recruited from the same Lagos-based independent program as Agoha and Godrick, Educational Basketball, where he started off as a hooper before transitioning to football.
“Daniel is so smart – big, agile, strong, physical player. Emmanuel is the best athlete we’ve seen,” Umenyiora said. Although he acknowledged that the SEC, where Tennessee play, is “a completely different beast” and that playing time was not guaranteed, his endorsement of tight end Okoye speaks volumes about the potential he sees in Lagos.
During the Super Bowl, a commercial depicting a young boy by the name of Kwesi (played by Eldad Osime) bumps into Umenyiora in Ghana while playing alone with an American football and imagining his NFL heroes surrounding him. Umenyiora explains to him that his dream could now become a reality, given the NFL’s involvement in Africa.
According to Umenyiora, however, aspiring American football players in Africa do not even need a chance encounter with him to make their dreams come true. Rather, the key to success might be as simple as tagging him on social media.
“Just keep on sending us your videos. Tag us all – myself, Kris Durham, NFL Academy, the NFL UK, NFL Africa – tag us, because we look at all the stuff. Let’s see what you have – send your videos in; let’s see your height, your size, your skill, your ability,” Umenyiora advised.
“We know you’re probably not going to be playing football, but we need to see your movement; we need to see how athletic you are. We’ll give you a shot – we’re having camps everywhere – skeleton camps, the mini camps. We’re not afraid to travel. Show us something that would make us want to travel down that way.”
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