AHMED HASSANEIN‘S JOURNEY to the doorstep of the NFL began on a balcony seven years ago in Cairo around a hookah.

With the roar of Cairo International Airport in the distance, Hassanein joined his two sisters, brother and nephew trading puffs in the sixth-floor penthouse they grew up in overlooking the Heliopolis suburb.

As they passed the hookah, Hassanein’s sisters, Gigi and Aziza Ibrahim, told Hassanein’s older brother, Cory Besch, about Hassanein’s life over the past decade after moving from California at age 6. Hassanein had forgotten how to speak English, had behavioral issues that caused him to be expelled from school, and was being raised by his mother, who he said had a substance abuse disorder.

“She was a very, very abusive person,” Hassanein told ESPN. “Like starting with addiction, with drugs and all that stuff, and she was really verbally abusive and physically abusive.”

Through it all, Hassanein took solace in sports including breakdancing, soccer, swimming, basketball, boxing, jujitsu, pingpong and CrossFit. He became the top-ranked CrossFit athlete in Egypt and one of the best in Africa. It also helped him cultivate a strong work ethic.

Besch, who was 30 at the time and making his first trip to Egypt in 20 years, hadn’t seen Hassanein in a decade. After hearing from his siblings that night — June 26, 2018 — Besch started formulating a plan to get Hassanein, then 15, back to the United States.

“I was like, ‘Well, what if he came and lived with me and played football for me?'” said Besch, who coached at Loara High School in Anaheim, California.

It was a major pivot for Hassanein, who was set to attend Riverside Preparatory, a military school in Gainesville, Georgia.

“I remember Aziza telling me, ‘It’s going to be really hard, and it’s going to be one of the most difficult things you’ve ever done because the culture shock is going to be there, you’re going to lose all your friends, you can’t speak English very well,'” Hassanein said.

“And I was like, ‘I can do it.'”

During a family vacation at a resort on the Red Sea later that week, Besch helped convince their father to let him move away 7,500 miles. A month later, Hassanein was on a plane to Los Angeles.

Fast-forward to today and — despite initial language barriers, lack of football knowledge and playing the sport for the first time as a sophomore in high school — Hassanein is on the verge of becoming the first Egyptian to be drafted into the NFL. ESPN draft analyst Matt Miller has the former Boise State defensive end, who is 6-foot-2, 267 pounds, going in the sixth round at pick No. 216 in his latest mock draft.

“It was surreal to think that we just dreamed this to save Ahmed and get him to the U.S., like ‘Project Mission: Get Ahmed to the U.S.,’ and then it was ‘Mission: Get Ahmed into College,’ and now it’s ‘Mission: Get Ahmed into the NFL,'” Gigi said from her apartment in Cairo.

“But it’s all surreal because who would’ve thought that Ahmed would be great at being a defensive lineman in American football when literally seven years ago, he was just sitting on the balcony praying that someone would … get him out of this misery.”

THE CULTURE SHOCK was real for Hassanein when he moved in with Besch in August 2018.

Everything from the food to the language to school was different. And then there was football.

All Hassanein knew about the sport was what Besch had posted on social media, most recently playing in a second-tier Austrian league from March to June 2018, just before he visited Egypt.

“People run and hit each other,” Hassanein recalled. “That’s all I know.”

When Hassanein arrived in California, Besch gave him a crash course, explaining everything from how to put on his pads, helmet and mouth guard to the sport’s rules.

“Everything from line of scrimmage to downs to your role and responsibility on the defense,” Besch said. “And I don’t think everything was explained explicitly because you don’t ever go back and explain the X’s and O’s in high school, right?”

Hassanein didn’t know how to get in a stance or how to catch a ball, said Mitch Olson, Hassanein’s head coach at Loara. His school’s football program was in one of the lower levels in California and didn’t have the resources other schools around them had. Each coach was in charge of multiple positions, and most of the kids didn’t play football before ninth grade because there wasn’t a youth program in the district.

“It’s like the kid got pulled off of Mars and started playing football,” Olson said.

Still, Olson saw the potential in the 16-year-old sophomore. He lined up Hassanein, then 6-foot-1 and 210 pounds, at defensive tackle on the junior varsity team for the first game of the season before moving him up to varsity. It was, by all accounts, an experiment.

Hassanein had at least one penalty every game because of his unfamiliarity with the rules. There was a game in which he grabbed a quarterback’s face mask to bring him down and another in which he tripped the quarterback, who was about to scramble by him. He remembered throwing players, kicking people and flipping them like in jiujitsu.

“I was out there just doing whatever,” Hassanein said. “I was just out there being physical. See ball, get ball.”

In fall 2018, Hassanein was watching highlights of former Los Angeles Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald.

“What high school does he go to?” Hassanein asked his brother.

“And he was like, ‘Bro, that’s the NFL, that’s the National Football League.’ I was like, ‘OK, I want to go there.’ And he was like, ‘Bro, you know you don’t have a D-line coach at your high school and you don’t have a sled?'”

It didn’t matter to Hassanein. After talking to his brother and Olson, and watching videos, he devised a plan: Hassanein began waking up at 5 a.m. every day to work out before school. After school, he’d go to practice — either football or basketball, depending on the season — and then go back to the gym for three to four hours a night.

Everything started to click for Hassanein midway through his sophomore season.

The key, Besch, Olson and defensive coordinator Jonathan Rangel decided, was to let Hassanein’s natural strength make up for whatever technique he lacked. It worked.

Eventually, Besch started taking Hassanein to camps, where he was facing — and outplaying — prospects from top high school programs around Southern California such as St. John Bosco and Mater Dei. The night before one camp, Hassanein studied pass-rush moves on YouTube and implemented them the next day.

Colleges noticed the three-star pass rusher. On Aug. 27, 2020, as his senior season was postponed until the spring because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hassanein received a direct message from Spencer Danielson, now Boise State’s head coach, who was then coaching the defensive line. He loved Hassanein’s film.

Hassanein told his brother, who couldn’t believe it. Besch played football with Danielson at Azusa Pacific University. Hassanein relayed that information to Danielson, and they hopped on a Zoom call to explain the situation.

Hassanein had scholarship offers from Fresno State, Duke, Kansas and Colorado before eventually choosing Boise State.

Had Hassanein’s life followed his initial plan of going to military school, looking back, he thought he’d return to Egypt after four years. Instead, he was living out a dream he never knew he had.

“It meant the world to me that somebody believed, and my brother always believed in me, but it gave me confirmation that I can do this,” Hassanein said. “I took it as a challenge because I had a lot of family members say, ‘You’re going to come back in two weeks. You’re never going to succeed. You can’t even speak English. How the hell are you going to play football?’

“And I really made it. I took it as, ‘OK, watch this.'”

DANIELSON STOOD OUTSIDE Boise State’s football facility on a June morning in 2021 with a hope and a prayer.

Because of COVID-19 restrictions, neither Danielson nor any of his coaches were able to recruit Hassanein in person, so the first time they met him was when he stepped out of the car that day. Sitting in the back of Danielson’s mind was the fact that Besch was 5-foot-8, 150 pounds in college.

“I’m waiting for him at the front of the facility like, ‘Please be 6-3. Please be 6-3,'” Danielson recalled to ESPN. “If he pops out and he’s 5-9 and Cory got me, I’m going to be really hot.

“And he pops out and he just looks like a Greek god. I’m like, ‘Yes.'”

His first year on campus, Hassanein looked like some of the Broncos’ juniors and was lifting more weight than a number of the upperclassmen, Boise State edge coach Jabril Frazier said.

From a football standpoint, Hassanein was very much a freshman.

“He didn’t know what was going on,” Frazier said. “But he played at a high level.”

Danielson’s way of rectifying that was with his “Football School,” a weeklong program leading into fall camp for all of Boise State’s incoming freshmen. It covered everything from the width of the field — 53.3 yards — to the verbiage Boise State’s coaches prefer to the fundamentals of tackling to A, B and C gaps.

For Hassanein, college football was an entirely new game. In high school, he relied on his natural ability to dominate. Not so much in college. He had to account for how the offensive lineman across from him lined up and blocked in every possible scenario and what kind of offense he was facing on a weekly basis.

It was essentially Football 101 for Hassanein.

“It was really eye-opening,” he said.

In 20 games over his first two seasons, he had two sacks. Then, going into his junior year in 2023, it all clicked. Hassanein finished with 12.5 sacks and was mentioned among the nation’s best pass rushers.

Heading into his senior season, he was coming off labrum surgery and spent the spring watching his own film and breaking down his games while he rehabbed. Hassanein had 9.5 sacks in 2024, giving him 24 for his career, the fourth most in school history.

“I currently have him projected as a late fifth- to early sixth-round pick as teams are always looking for pass-rush help,” ESPN draft analyst Jordan Reid said. “Hassanein will likely be a part of special teams early on during his career while he searches to earn a role as a contributor on defense.”

Hassanein is on the verge of making international history. When he does, it will be an emotional moment for those who helped him on the journey.

“The journey that dude made and the guts that he had to do, the things that he did to get to where he is, it is storybook, man,” Olson said. “It really is. It’s a frigging movie.”

He knows he’s not the biggest or quickest, but he says he thinks his strength will help him become a disruptive pass rusher at the next level.

Danielson described Hassanein as “one of the most violent run defenders we’ve ever had here,” pointing to the Broncos’ first defensive play of the Fiesta Bowl against Penn State.

It was first-and-10 from the Nittany Lions’ 28-yard line when Penn State tight end Tyler Warren went in motion from left to right, overloading the side closest to Hassanein. It was a run and, with a running start, Hassanein bulldozed Warren back four yards, throwing him to the ground in the process.

To Danielson, that play is everything teams need to know about Hassanein.

“Once he gets there, he’s going to be all over the coaches about being better, getting better, getting help,” Frazier said. “Give him a year to two years in the NFL and you’ll be hearing his name a lot.”