LONDON (AP) — Neff Giwa sometimes asks himself: “Is this really happening to me?”
Incredibly, yes.
The 20-year-old Irishman who has never played American football committed on Sunday to play at South Carolina as an offensive lineman.
Giwa, who is also Nigerian, has come a long way — from Tipperary — in a short amount of time. Just a few months after showing an interest in the sport, he was touring U.S. college campuses, meeting coaches and collecting
offers.
It’s a lot to handle, even for someone who is 6 feet, 7 1/2 inches tall, weighs 295 pounds and has 37-inch-long arms and great foot speed.
“I knew that there’d be a journey there, but I could never have anticipated this,” Giwa, in an interview with The Associated Press, said of the whirlwind around his recruitment.
Giwa, whose full first name is Oluwanifemi, selected the Gamecocks over offers from Miami, North Carolina, SMU, Tennessee and Texas.
Giwa had two visits to Columbia and spent “ a lot of time ” with coach Shane Beamer.
Giwa — pronounced with a hard G — heard about Brandon Collier through a friend familiar with the American’s track record of finding, training and placing international kids at U.S. college football programs. Collier, an American who played defensive line at UMass, runs PPI Recruits out of Germany.
Collier had Giwa visit him for a workout and immediately envisioned him protecting quarterbacks.
“If you can create a tackle in a laboratory, this is what you want him to look like,” Collier told the AP.
It wasn’t just his size, though. Collier clocked Giwa at 4.88 seconds in the 40-yard dash and measured his broad jump at 9 feet, 10 inches — “pretty freakish numbers,” Collier noted.
“Then he has the toughness,” he added. “You can have all these measurements, but if you’re not tough mentally and physically then you probably won’t make it.”
Collier was bringing his latest group of recruits on campus tours earlier this month and decided to add Giwa — mostly just to introduce him to the process.
“I didn’t have expectations,” Giwa told the AP before Sunday's announcement. “It was just to see what was out there, basically, and what to work towards.”
“Things kind of picked up.”
Not long after touching down in the U.S., Collier detoured to Toronto to check out another touted prospect. Giwa joined him.
“I had them do some pass sets and some one-on-ones with some kids, he looked phenomenal,” Collier said of Giwa.
So he instructed Giwa to immediately create an X account so colleges could learn more about him. Collier then posted a couple of videos "and it went viral from there.”
“Miami, they messaged me literally 60 seconds after I posted it,” Collier said. “The head coach (Mario Cristobal) wrote me a message — ‘get him to Miami.’”
Like actually one minute?
“Literally 60 seconds, man,” Collier said. “The power of networking and social media. People know what I do.”
North Carolina would have been an intriguing choice not only to play for iconic coach Bill Belichick but also because the Tar Heels play their 2026 opener against TCU at Aviva Stadium in Dublin.
“I haven’t spoken to him personally,” Giwa said of Belichick.
Playing in his country someday would be great: “I was born in Ireland, and I was raised in Ireland. It definitely would be cool and a bit of an honor to do that.”
Marvin Nguetsop, a German defensive end who is doing a year of prep school in Connecticut, was considered the top recruit on Collier’s recent tour. He got offers from Ohio State and Michigan.
“All of the kids had offers on the tour, too,” Collier said. “Tennessee offered five or six of the kids on one day."
Giwa is not the first of Collier's recruits to get offers despite no football experience. Hero Kanu received an offer from Penn State without ever playing the sport. The defensive lineman ultimately chose Ohio State. He now plays at Texas.
Giwa grew up in Cashel, a town in County Tipperary with a population under 5,000.
His mother is a nurse and his father is a physiotherapist. Giwa, who has three older siblings, said they were the first Nigerian family to move into town and that local residents “definitely made us feel welcome.”
What does he tell everyone about college football and the facilities he's visited?
“I tell them it’s a different world over there," he said.
Rugby, soccer, hurling and Gaelic football are the local sports.
Giwa likes that American football allows him to use his size. He sees a rugby-to-football template in Jordan Mailata, a 6-foot-8 Australian who plays offensive tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles.
Name, image and likeness deals allow college athletes, even international ones if done correctly, to earn big money.
“It does make you think about possibilities and choices and how you can help others. (But) it’s more just making your family proud," he said.
Giwa credits Collier with creating life-changing opportunities. He's not sure what he'd be doing otherwise.
"I’d just be a regular guy,” he said with a laugh, “doing what 90% of the world is doing, just trying to make a living. That’s why I'm so grateful because I’m able to do something that I really love now.”
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