A SAINSBURY’S worker has gone from stacking shelves to potentially making millions after being drafted into the NFL.
Travis Clayton, 23, was playing club rugby in Basingstoke but is now set to change his life after being drafted by the Buffalo Bills.
The 6foot 7inch former winger is now set to try his hand as an offensive lineman after running a 40-yard dash in 4.79 seconds during the NFL Combine.
Clayton was the 221st pick overall in the seventh round in Detroit last week.
He said: “I don’t think it’s really going to kick in yet until I actually get to Buffalo. But at the moment, it’s a world of emotions going on right now. It’s crazy.”
Clayton has never played a game of American Football despite trying out for the league in 2019 during an NFL Academy in London.
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He is only the second ever drafted from the NFL’s international player pathway (IPP), which aims to increase the number of players from outside America in the sport.
That’s the same route as taken by Welsh star Louis Rees-Zammit who was signed, rather than drafted, as a running back for the champion Kansas City Chiefs.
Clayton’s mother, Nicky, travelled to Detroit to support him and says she “couldn’t be prouder” of her “special” son.
She wrote in a Facebook post: “We are over the moon to announce that Travis Clayton has just been drafted into the NFL Buffalo Bills.”
“He is so special. We couldn’t be prouder and love you so much.”
The Telegraph reported that earlier this year Clayton had been working for an employment screening company and before that at a Sainsbury’s as a customer assistant.
A video posted to X by the NFL shows his friends cheering jubilantly as it was announced that he had been drafted.
If he plays out his full contract and is not cut by the Bills, Clayton is set to earn somewhere above £3.2million over the course of the contract.
This cannot be renegotiated by the Bills until Clayton completes his final regular season game in his third year.
Australian Jordan Mailata is the only other player to be drafted into the NFL via the IPP.
Now he has become one of the best linemen in the NFL and plays for the Philadelphia Eagles.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing for the Sydneysider who spent two seasons on the Eagles practice squad learning the NFL game and battling injuries.
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He weighs 360 pounds now and is often referred to by peers as the “human wrecking ball.”
He signed a four-year contract extension with the Eagles in 2021 for $64million.
How does the NFL draft work?
Here in the UK, the closest thing we have to the NFL Draft is football’s Transfer Deadline Day.
But there are huge differences between the two.
The Draft is how teams select their rookie players for the new season.
Players from College Football put themselves forward for NFL selection and are then chosen one-by-one by the 32 franchises involved.
The NFL Draft works like this:
- There are seven rounds in total, each comprising of 32 picks/selections.
- When ‘on the clock’ a team has a certain amount of time to make their decision and select the player of their choosing to join their roster.
- This is 10 minutes in round one, 7 minutes in round two, 5 minutes in round three-six and 4 minutes in round seven.
- The team that finished 32nd in the rankings last season gets the first overall pick.
- From then on, the picks continue in descending order in relation to last year’s performance.
- In addition to these picks, before the draft the NFL assign as many as 32 compensatory picks at the end of rounds 3-7.
- These are dished out to teams who lost free agents to others in the previous year to ‘compensate’ for those losses with additional NFL Draft picks.
- No team can receive more than four compensatory NFL Draft picks in a given year.
- Teams can ‘trade’ their picks to jostle for position – this can be negotiated at any point of the Draft; before or during.
