PHILADELPHIA – They were only two games, played four years ago, in a loosely-organized weekend football club located in another hemisphere halfway around the world. To Nic Purcell, the games were an absurd imitation of the real thing, a farce played for free, by out-of-shape men who knew little about American football. To the NCAA, the two club games he played in New Zealand were legitimate enough to destroy his eligibility and crush his eventual dream of playing major college football.

How could he know a senseless edict delivered from the cold halls of the NCAA would be the best thing to happen to him?

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All Purcell wanted to do was play a little football. He decided this in the spring of 2011 at the age of 25 when he and his wife arrived in the United States from his native New Zealand. He enrolled at Golden West Community College in Southern California hoping to study physical fitness and also thought he might try football, a game he had played a few times on a whim back home.

Given that he was 6-foot-6, 260 pounds and once an elite-level basketball player in New Zealand, the Golden West coaches told him they'd love to have him try out. Little did they know he would become such a natural at left tackle that many of the country's top college football teams offered him a scholarship during his second season at Golden West.

However, little did Purcell know those two casual club football games he played in 2009 would fall under an NCAA rule that considered such games to be part of his football career, starting an eligibility clock that expired at the end of last season.

"I had gone from 250, 260 pounds to nearly 300 pounds, working my butt off [to be big enough for big-time football]," he said last week in a thick New Zealand accent while participating in the Philadelphia Eagles' OTAs. "For someone to do this…"

He gave a dry chuckle.

"It was pretty difficult."

Except it was also a blessing because Chip Kelly, the former Oregon coach who appealed Purcell's case to the NCAA, left the school to coach the Eagles. Kelly invited Purcell to try out at the Eagles' rookie camp last month. At camp's end, Kelly and the Eagles' management gave the player who had only two years of community college football a contract.

"He can look at the NCAA and say, 'Screw you,' " Nick Mitchell, the head coach at Golden West said by phone. "What must the NCAA think of this? Because the kid played two games in a beer league where you have to pay to play, you start the clock on his eligibility? And now to have the kid go straight to the NFL? What does that say?" Growing up, Purcell never could have imagined a football life. He barely knew what American football was. Occasionally games appeared on television but the sport was as foreign to him as Aussie rules football is to Americans. He played basketball as a child, developing into a power forward. He said he played at some of the highest levels of youth basketball in the country, even choosing the sport over rugby when he played both in high school until his basketball career stalled.

At 19, Purcell – a member of the LDS Church – went on a two-year mission where he was stationed on a small set of islands off the New Zealand coast called the Republic of Kiribati. He attended Church College where he played basketball and at 23 he married his wife Madison, an American whose mother is from New Zealand. For a couple of years, he worked as a youth minister and occasionally played on casual club rugby teams both in New Zealand and in Australia.

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