With their documentary “Dreaming of the NFL” Nico Baumbach and Fabian Jänsch have entered exciting new football territory: It is the first detailed documentary that accompanied Fabian Höller, a German college football player, in his preparations for the draft last year. Höller and the two producers spoke exclusively to SPOX and gave insights behind the scenes – to the incredible moments, as well as the unpleasant aspects. All three draft days are available live and in the original commentary on DAZN.
The leap from the GFL into the NFL is anything but easy and in many ways a huge hurdle – physically, but also mentally. Moubarak Djeri is trying this step with the Arizona Cardinals, Wide Receiver Moritz Böhringer is still working on his NFL dream, but didn’t take his chance at least with the Minnesota Vikings.
“Last year I was rather unprepared, I would say,” Böhringer openly admitted to SPOX last year. “It’s something completely different than in Germany, of course – just the fact that everything here is professional is a big change. Everything is more intense, the media are waiting everywhere. That’s something else.”
Fabian Höller can look back on four years of football experience in the USA. In college, but the transition from the GFL to college level was also difficult, as he now revealed in an interview with SPOX: “I didn’t really know what to expect – of course, I knew that it would be faster, harder, more physical and mentally anything but easy. But how much harder it would really be, I didn’t know that at that time; and that was clearly more.”
He would best describe it as follows: “Playing a complete game here in Germany was no problem at all. To get through a complete game in college for at least the first two years, that was really hard. I was completely broken afterwards, that was much harder. The Playbook is also a much bigger challenge: it has grown from ten pages to 100 pages”.
Höller played for UMass, the University of Massachusetts, in the USA for four years. Meanwhile he is back in Germany and his attempt last year, after completing his college career, to get into the NFL via the draft, initially flew properly under the radar in Germany. This changed – with a detailed documentation of his path to the draft.
Of course, Höller’s football career starts well before that. Before the draft, before UMass, before the thought of football at all. He did not know the NFL, nor College Football, nor did he know anything about the sport when his sports teacher at school in the summer of 2008 used some lessons for Flag Football.
“A classmate was playing football back then, with the Cologne Falcons and he had arranged with my PE teacher that the then head coach and the American quarterback would come by and play flag football with us,” he told SPOX. “We played with them for about an hour and a half. Afterwards I talked to them and they invited me to training. “In the next week or two, I just went to practice.”
With quick success: The coaches decided after a short muster that the offensive Line Höllers will be their new home. Or, as he would say, “They put me with the other big boys.”
It took Höller about a year to acclimatize physically, technically and as far as the Playbook was concerned. He had already played during this year – with mixed success, as he himself admits: “Two, three years later I watched videos from the first season and could only laugh and shake my head. That looked pretty cruel!”
And yet it happened quickly. Höller’s then coach David Odenthal, who had played Center for the University of Toledo for many years, recognized the talent of his protégé and encouraged him to apply for colleges. Together they made a highlight tape and sent it to numerous colleges after Höller’s fourth year. “That’s how I first ended up in Wyoming, where his former assistant coach was Head Coach and his former team-mate O-Line-Coach,” said Höller of the college recruiting process.
Wyoming invited and flew him on an official visit, “I was there for three days. But apparently the people in charge didn’t like me that much, but vice versa I didn’t really like it there either. Sure, the guys were all nice, but you have to imagine that it’s somewhere in nowhere. Really. Beautiful as a dream, to go on holiday – but to live there for four years? That’s another thing.”
The first experience with the college recruiting process was therefore fruitless. But soon another school showed interest, Rutgers contacted me a few days before Christmas 2012: “Then I flew to New York five days before Christmas and I really liked it there. The conversations were great.”
At the same time, the team was preparing for a bowl game a few days later, they split up with great mutual interest and the announcement by the college officials that they would contact me shortly after the game – “but the days passed, then it was already mid-January and I still hadn’t heard anything”.
So the time until the College Signing Day at the beginning of February slowly became short. Then the call came from UMass.
One week before Signing Day the official visit was scheduled, after which Head Coach Höller offered a scholarship. Shortly thereafter everything was in dry cloths.
But Höller’s story, as he further told in an interview with SPOX, provides an interesting insight into the practices of recruiting college athletes.
“Rutgers apparently wanted to offer me a scholarship, but they only had two places available for Offensive Linemen that year. One was already gone when I was there, and shortly after my visit a second lineman apparently accepted – so my place was also gone”, as Höller later learned.
But the coach who recruited him “knew some people at UMass and passed on all the things they had about me to UMass. So UMass first became aware of me, the coaches there later confirmed this to me. How it all came about: I made a good decision with UMass.”
It didn’t take long before Höller realized the new – one could also say American – dimensions: “My very first college game was right in Wisconsin, in front of 80,000 spectators – you’re a bit more nervous after all. As a backup center he took some snaps while warming up, “they went somewhere, but certainly not to the quarterback. First you had to fight with your own nervousness, luckily things worked out better in the game afterwards”.
The home games, many of which were played at the New England Patriots’ stadium, were not quite as busy. During the walkthrough Höller and Co. regularly experienced the training of the Pats, Höller also got to know the German ex-patriot tackle Sebastian Vollmer: “That was really cool. We were not so much talking about football in concrete terms, but rather in general terms. “He also comes from near Düsseldorf and you just chatted a little bit.”
But the spectacular college atmosphere was especially noticeable against the big schools – Wisconsin, Penn State, Florida or Notre Dame, “these were all great games, great stadiums. In Notre Dame it was a great feeling when we balanced to 21:21, the stadium was suddenly quiet and you could suddenly hear yourself again”.
It soon becomes clear that these games also belong in his personal highlight collection. “Notre Dame is certainly one of them, even though we went down a bit at the end – but until just before halftime we were at eye level with them. For me, this includes games like against Mississippi State or South Carolina, which were completely open until the last minute and these big SEC teams were on the brink of defeat. These are moments that last.”
Page 1: About school sports to football, recruitment and nervousness before 80,000
Page 2: The dark side, coincidence on New Year’s Eve – and the next German football documentary