Bobby Godinez brought a pair of size 16 cleats to a park in Torrance, Calif., to meet a future first-round draft pick of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But on that day five years ago, Max Iheanachor was still a teenage basketball player who’d yet to play football.
That was about to change.
“I was really good friends with his travel basketball coach,” said Godinez, then football coach at East Los Angeles College. “We’d always talked about, ‘Let me know if you ever get any bigger players that maybe aren’t quite going to be Division I basketball players. Or maybe they are, but they max out at about 6-6 or 6-7.”
If so, Godinez hoped he might convert them into offensive linemen. As the head football coach of a junior college in a city of 12 million residents, he was always on the hunt for undiscovered talent.
His friend, AAU coach Cory DeSanti, suggested Iheanachor, who’d moved from Nigeria at 13, played soccer in Africa and embraced basketball here. Godinez was interested, so they met at the park in a grassy area near a basketball court.
“We put him through some drills, just so I could see him move a little bit,” said Godinez, remembering how Iheanachor had light feel and huge calf muscles. “Once I saw him take one or two positive steps, I was like, Max, you’re going to be special.
“You need to get in the car, get over (to campus) and sign up for school. We’ll take care of the rest.”
When Iheanachor’s family and friends gathered for his NFL Draft party last month, Godinez was there. The Steelers drafted Iheanachor in the first round, taking the 6-foot-6, 321-pound offensive tackle from Arizona State with the 21st pick.
“It was one of the most fulfilling parts of my coaching career,” Godinez said. “Seeing him and the family so happy, knowing that you even played a small role in that, it’s a great feeling.”
Godinez understood as well as anybody the work, trust and dedication needed for Iheanachor to go from football novice to NFL prospect. First was the work put in by Iheanachor, who learned the sport during two seasons at East Los Angeles College and later three at Arizona State.
But there also was the work of Godinez and his coaching staff, who started off teaching Iheanachor the basics. And there was the patience of Iheanachor’s mother, who at first questioned whether junior college football was a waste of time.
The 22-year-old’s path to the draft maybe wasn’t the usual route, but Godinez told him on Day 1 that football was a sport that could make him money.
“When I first started, honestly, I knew it was going to be hard,” Iheanachor said. “Obviously, the vision was there, but I knew it was going to be hard. Just try to get better every day and put your head down and work, not to try to look too far ahead and predict stuff. Just work every day.”
Iheanachor made himself into an all-conference player at Arizona State and started 31 career games for the Sun Devils, yet he might be the offensive tackle in this year’s draft with the most untapped upside.
As a redshirt senior, Iheanachor earned second-team Big 12 honors after allowing zero sacks on 479 pass-blocking snaps.
“He’s just an ultra-athletic player that’s just scratching the surface,” said Steelers offensive line coach James Campen, pointing out how he matched up well “against some really good football players and good edge rushers” in the Big 12.
But by all accounts, his first year of football was probably his hardest despite hardly playing.
Iheanachor was trying to learn a sport he didn’t know surrounded by college teammates who’d played football their entire lives. Plus, at around 250 pounds, he didn’t yet have the size for offensive tackle.
“That first year was rough, switching to a new sport,” Iheanachor said. “I wasn’t playing, had to gain weight, and if you guys are used to Nigerian parents, they love doctors and nurses, so my mom was kind of on me. She was like, ‘You’re not even playing, you’re wasting your time, you should go to a four-year (college).’”
He’d attended a magnet high school in Los Angeles that focused on medicine and science but had no football team.
Academic aspirations led to a make-or-break moment late in his first season at East Los Angeles College, which didn’t quite meet his family’s expectations for him. The school is a two-year community college with around 33,000 students, located in Monterey Park about 10 miles from downtown.
“I sat down and was like, my parents, they wanted me to go to a four-year (college), that was the whole point of us coming out here,” said Iheanachor, whose family moved from Atlanta to Los Angeles. “They’re really big on education.”
Their meeting came in the latter part of his first season, and Iheanachor wasn’t excelling as a football player, his coach admits. He was still having trouble grasping the fundamental concepts of blocking.
“I just remember I’d keep saying, ‘What the heck is an A-gap, a B-gap,’” Iheanachor said. “It was like, you’ve got to know all these things? I’m like, bro, you can’t just line up and go block?”
Godinez compared the challenge to learning a foreign language from scratch and needing to be fluent right away. But the words, the terminology and the ideas were all new to him — and it showed.
“When you’re an offensive tackle and you’re going the wrong way, that leaves your quarterback pretty susceptible to some big hits,” Godinez said. “It was a big learning curve for him and for us. We were a very good team that had some pieces like Max that, you know, kind of complicated how good potentially we could be.
“He saw it and mom saw it.”
This led to the decisive moment when Iheanachor’s football career almost ended. Sitting in Godinez’s office, Iheanachor talked with his coach about quitting.
Godinez understood why.
“It didn’t look like he was having much fun,” Godinez said. “He was saying, ‘Coach, I just don’t think I can do this. This is just not the right sport for me. I’m not progressing. I’m not very good. I just don’t feel like I belong out here.’
“And I told him, ‘Max, you tell your mom that she’s going to thank me someday. She needs to trust me, and you need to get your (behind) into that locker room and change, because practice is in 30 minutes.”
Iheanachor agreed to stick around. Godinez was glad he did but said he wasn’t surprised since Iheanachor always was “very coachable.”
Iheanachor became a full-time starter the next season and ultimately emerged as a top junior college prospect nationally. On3 Sports ranked him as the second-best JUCO offensive tackle in the 2023 recruiting class and the sixth-best prospect overall.
“Once he started to mentally grasp the concepts, his progression kind of elevated to another level,” Godinez said. “Then the (FBS) coaches start coming in, everybody sees him, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, we want that kid.’”
Arizona State offensive line coach Saga Tuitele was at Fresno State when he first learned about Iheanachor. When Tuitele was hired by Kenny Dillingham in 2023, he recruited Iheanachor to Tempe.
“We needed him in a place where they had the resources to help him continue to build,” Godinez said. “Arizona State was the perfect fit.”
Godinez gave up coaching this year but remains athletic director at East Los Angeles College. He said there was a sense of accomplishment, especially by former coaches and teammates, when Iheanachor got drafted.
In fact, Godinez said he just heard from a former linebacker who tested Iheanachor every day at practice with his pass rush.
“He actually texted me a couple days ago,” Godinez said with a laugh. “He goes, ‘We did it, coach.’ Yes, we did. Yes, we did.”