While with the Swarco Raiders, then-head coach Shuan Fatah started "Rookie Mondays" – the chance for players from other sports backgrounds to be seen by his staff, he told European League of Football commissioner Patrick Esume.
Pircher fit that category, having played handball. He enjoyed that Swarco Raiders game Braghini took him to so much, he decided to try out for the team at age 19.
Then-Swarco offensive line coach Lee Rowland, who spent time coaching with Fatah in NFL Europe, told Esume in the same interview that Pircher's size stood out right away, but he wanted to see him run. The latter showed Rowland that Pircher had good mobility, so they progressed to individual and position drills, with Rowland working him out every day.
At that point, Fatah said they weren't thinking about the NFL. They were just hoping Pircher would return next Monday, because when it comes to the best athletes in Europe who show up for those workouts, sometimes they don't come back.
Fortunately, Pircher did.
"I saw what Lee saw, and then obviously we just prayed he was coming back into the program," Fatah told Esume. "And after a while, we moved him into the program."
After one season with the Raiders in which he helped the club win the Australian Football League championship, Pircher was called up to the Italian national team to play a pair of important games against Austria and Switzerland – both victories that helped Italy reach the semifinal round of the International Federation of American Football's European tournament. When Fatah and Rowland were hired by the Hildesheim Invaders of the German Football League in the fall of 2019, they gave Pircher a contract to play for the Invaders.
The work he put in through 2019 would pay off. While training for the 2020 season in Germany, he was contacted by James Cook of the NFL's International Player Pathway Program.
Established in 2017 at the league's London office, the NFL's International Player Pathway Program canvases various amateur sports leagues around the world to identify prospects who are NFL caliber-athletes.
Sometimes they are amateur American football players. Other times, according to Cook, a member of the league's London staff who assists in international football development through the pathway program and NFL Academy, they can be "crossover athletes" who come from other sports like rugby or basketball, like Chilean tight end and former basketball player Sammis Reyes of the Washington Football Team.
The 6-foot-7 1/2, 300-pound Pircher fell into the former category, having played at the highest level of American football in Austria in the Austrian Football League. He also came from an athletic background, having played soccer growing up in additional to handball and other sports.
"Every sport I did helped me a lot, because my parents made me do sports since I was in kindergarten," Pircher said. "Every kind of sport, like, swimming, climbing. I skied a lot. Obviously soccer, handball. You can take from every sport something away, and the most important thing you get from all the sports is the feeling for your body, and learning how your body works and how to use which muscle. It helped me a lot. The handball work, the hand-eye coordination is for sure something that will help me. All of it effects together and brought me here also."
Cook and his NFL colleagues agreed, seeing a player who fit the mold of the type of NFL-caliber athletes they're looking for.
"You've got this really big athlete that has kind of grown up his whole life playing a sport like handball, so he's light on his feet, he has good hand eye coordination, he has this an athletic makeup, you don't often find in guys that size, because they just don't play sports like that generally," Cook said.
Though Pircher was raw when they discovered him, his collection of traits and intangibles projected positively, so much so that he became one of 11 players selected to compete for a spot in the 2021 NFL International Player Pathway Program in January.
"Exceptional size, some really raw developmental traits, some natural strength," Cook said. "Don't get me wrong, he was very raw when we first found him, and there's things to work on, but when you move forward with a prospect like Max, you have to believe that a lot of that is coachable. And fortunately with him, it was and is, and he's going to continue to learn. But he is very coachable, he's intelligent – things that have to be in your favor when you're trying to play catch up like Max is at this point."
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