'A Raw Piece of Clay:' Bills GM Brandon Beane Praises His 2024 NFL Draft Pick Who Has Never Played Football

Over 250 men heard their names called throughout the 2024 NFL Draft, each individual utterance serving as a momentary celebration of a lifetime’s worth of hard work, dedication, and resilience. Each player who received a call from an NFL executive this past weekend faced their own unique adversity along their respective journey, but all of them share one (expected) commonality—a breadth of experience playing American football.

All but one.

Offensive tackle Travis Clayton has never faced a spin move or ghost rush from an edge rusher. He’s never had to pick up an unexpected blitz from the secondary. He’s never been tasked with protecting the quarterback’s blindside or establishing the line of scrimmage in the run game.

This isn’t an indictment on the amateur level at which he competed, as he’s never actually competed in organized American football. He’s never taken a snap in a recognized American football game. But that didn’t stop Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane from selecting him with the 221st overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. 

“You don’t get into this seat smartly drafting players that you’ve never seen play football before, I’ll start there,” Beane joked during a recent appearance on The Pat McAfee Show.

It was likely one of the stranger draft calls he’s ever had to make. Players chosen in the NFL Draft, by and large, have experience playing the sport general managers are selecting them to play professionally. It seems, from an outsider's perspective, a rather important prerequisite. 

But if there were ever a player to buck the justified trend for, Clayton seems a worthy trailblazer. The word “athlete” may not do him justice; the 6-foot-7, 301-pound prospect ran a 4.82-second 40-yard dash in front of scouts at the International Player Pathway Program Pro Day, which would have been the best among offensive linemen at this year’s NFL Scouting Combine by a tenth of a second. 

Straight-line speed may seem a rather irrelevant attribute of an offensive tackle, but it’s far from the only feather in Clayton’s proverbial cap; born in Basingstoke, England, he played several sports in his youth, among them, association football (soccer) and rugby union. He spent time in the youth academy of Fulham (who are currently ranked 13th in the Premier League, the top flight of English Football) before committing himself to rugby union, playing for his hometown Basingstoke R.F.C.

Clayton ultimately opted to make the transition to American football—a sport he has no experience in—by joining the NFL’s International Player Pathway (IPP) Program, which was founded in 2017 as a way to “provide elite international athletes with the opportunity to compete at the NFL level . . . [and] work to earn a spot on an NFL roster.” Over 35 international athletes have signed with NFL rosters since the program’s inception, among them, Efe Obada, who notched 3.5 sacks for Buffalo in the 2021 NFL season.

Buffalo fans have more direct experience with the IPP Program in the form of Christian Wade, a former rugby union superstar who spent three seasons with the Bills’ practice squad from 2019–2021. Wade never took a regular-season snap for Buffalo but was a consistent preseason darling, memorably scoring a 65-yard touchdown against the Carolina Panthers in a 2019 preseason contest.

Wade’s path to a viable career in professional football was always steep; he didn’t make the transition until he was 27 years of age, and at 5-foot-9, 187 pounds, he was a bit undersized to project as a rosterable NFL running back. Contrast this with Clayton—who is a towering 6-foot-7, moves like a gazelle, and is making the jump in his early 20s—and you can see that Buffalo’s second formal dip into the IPP Program may provide more fortune than its first.

Clayton was selected as one of 16 players in this year’s IPP class, participating in a Pro Day in front of NFL scouts this past March. It was here that his athletic ability caught the attention of several NFL teams, among them, the Bills. Beane broke down what went into scouting Clayton during a recent appearance on The Pat McAfee show, noting that the prospect caught the eye of Buffalo offensive line coach Aaron Kromer.

“We sent a scout down to watch these guys at the University of South Florida, all of the guys in the International Pathway Program,” Beane said. “This was one of the guys he flagged, [said] ‘Take a look, you saw his athletic ability, let’s get him in front of the O-line coach.’ 

“We got Aaron Kromer here; Krom called me back here one day and was watching the film once it came in—you see this guy bend, you see him run off the ball, you see him hit the bags. Some raw hand technique, things like that, but to watch a guy run, like, [a] 4.79 [40-yard dash] at that size, the athletic ability screams.”

An impressive intangible profile is one thing, but how’s his balance? His technique? Can he handle a bull rush from a pass rusher?

The honest answer? We don’t know—Beane included in the royal ‘we’—but with the 221st pick in the draft, it’s a strong athletic profile to bet on. Making the risk a bit easier to stomach is the NFL’s recently amended IPP Program rules that allow every team to carry an international member on their practice squad in an exemption slot; even if Clayton does not crack Buffalo’s 53-man roster out of training camp, it can keep him around on the practice squad without allotting one of its 16 slots to him.

“Is he a raw piece of clay? Yes,” Beane said. “The other positive here is that, in the International Program, we get an exemption. We can carry an extra player on the 90 [man roster] to training camp, 91, and if we were to put him on practice squad, it allows us to have a 17th member.”

With the selection of Clayton, Beane is attempting to replicate the success the Philadelphia Eagles have had with Jordan Mailata, a former rugby player who the then-Super Bowl champion Eagles selected in the seventh round of the 2018 NFL Draft. Mailata—who had no prior American football experience—has developed into a stalwart tackle for Philadelphia, starting 57 games over the last four years.

Beane isn’t expecting lightning to strike twice. He realizes that Mailata’s path to the NFL is wholly unique and, more than likely, won’t be replicated by Clayton. However, in the seventh round, the possibility was simply too intriguing to pass on.

“Probably not smart to draft too many players that you’ve never seen play football, but in the seventh round, this seemed like a shot worth taking,” Beane said. “Jordan Mailata has been a great example—if he came even somewhere close to that, it would be well worth that selection.”