Uar Bernard has never played a down of organized football. He is also the Eagles’ seventh-round pick, No. 251 overall, in the 2026 NFL Draft.
A defensive tackle, Bernard is from Nigeria and is a physical specimen. At 6-foot-4, 306 pounds, he has six percent body fat. At the HBCU Showcase and International Player Pathway Pro Day in March, he ran a 4.63 40-yard dash, had a 39-inch vertical jump.
Originally noticed playing basketball as a teenager, Bernard was invited by former New York Giant and Atlanta Falcon defensive end Osi Umenyiora to participate in the 2024 NFL Nigeria camp.
Bernard would work out at several other football camps over three years in Africa before he was selected for the NFL’s International Player Pathway program class of 2026, the same program that produced Eagles offensive tackle Jordan Mailata, an Australian, who was chosen in the seventh round of the 2018 Draft.
Uar Bernard: “It’s a dream come true for me because I’ve worked hard for this. I’ve not played football, but I’ve gone through some drills that made me believe that I’m going to get better every day. I thank God for everything. I thank God for life. I thank God for the opportunities given to me to be drafted by the Eagles.”
Executive Vice President/General Manager Howie Roseman: “We wanted to take the chance on the kid. Obviously, we’ve had great success with that program. We spent a lot of time with him. Coach [Defensive Line / Senior Defensive Assistant/Associate Head Coach Clint] Hurtt went down there and spent the day with him, worked him out. You know, just for us, it was a passion project. Obviously, he’s got a lot of tools in his body. Understand it’s going to take time. It’s going to take a lot of time here. It was pretty cool. We spent a lot of time talking about unusual, you know, and certainly unusual with that guy.”
Ha, yeah they get grilled for that a lot (it was pre-Zierlein at least), but as they’ll point out, their scoring system was vastly different back then. I think even the range was different, but I know it was more volatile. I think this would have been like a 6.3 today (and like a 6.9/7.0 today would have been like a 7.9 back then), which is still way too low obviously, but not as bad as this looks.
You could have made the same argument about TeSlaa - and many did last year - but he looks like pretty comfortably the best WR to come off the board from the start of the 3rd round on (you could make the argument for Dike or Lambert-Smith I suppose, but the former was about his returning more than receiving and the latter faded a lot down the stretch).
Plus, it has since come out that the Broncos were about to take him shortly thereafter when they took Pat Bryant instead. I don’t know when Manu was actually gonna come off the board, but I suspect our FO was much more in tune with it than we were. Whether he should have gone that early is a different discussion, but hey, you win some you lose some.
