Still, Cox may well be the last American to make it in the A.F.L. In March, the league announced that it would be shelving its combine in the United States — which it had been holding annually since 2012 — for at least a year as it made Ireland the priority in its search for international talent.

An earlier edition of that combine changed Cox’s life.

In the spring of 2014, a few months before graduating from Oklahoma State University, where he walked onto the basketball team, he received an invitation to attend a combine for the A.F.L. in Los Angeles. He had never heard of the league.

But the league had a shortage of people capable of performing the specialized role of ruckman/center-half-forward, which requires someone at least 6 feet 6 inches tall, mobile, athletic and well coordinated with both their hands and their feet.

In an island nation of about 25 million people, there just aren’t many who fit that bill. But there are plenty of American college basketball players who do.

Cox was one of them, and he killed it at the combine.

After a visit with several teams in Australia, he received four contract offers. Cox had already accepted a job as an engineer with Exxon Mobil in Houston, figuring his athletic career was over, but backed out of it to sign with Collingwood in Melbourne in 2014.

Upon arriving at the football club in late August 2014, he and Craig McRae, the club’s then head of development, went to work. “We just got into the everyday grind of getting it all done and really locked into it,” Cox recalled with a smile.