Sometime between Taliese Fuaga’s junior and senior year of high school, his father, Sau Fuaga, dropped him off with offensive and defensive line guru Faipea Avaava at Athletic Edge Performance, and he had a message for the coach.
Avaava already had been training Fuaga for a while in the finer points of offensive line play. Fuaga was a solid high school player for a bad high school team. Solid, but not spectacular. There was something missing.
The father recognized that and spoke frankly.
“His dad brought him in and told me that the only recruiter that has been coming by is the Marine recruiter, and that’s where his butt is going to end up if he doesn’t fix his attitude,” Avaava recalled.
The conversation was memorable for Avaava, because that is about the time he saw a change in the younger Fuaga. It wasn’t that Fuaga’s attitude itself was a problem; it was just that he had a kid’s attitude. One without serious aspirations. At that inflection point, Avaava watched the kid grow up and pour himself into something.
“In his brain, he started to realize, ‘Wow, I might have something here,’” Avaava said. “(He began) accepting the fact that he can make things happen.”
What is the end result when someone with natural talent discovers the drive to match it? It can look a lot like Fuaga.
The Marine Corps recruiter was followed by the college recruiters, and scholarship offers to Power Five schools soon followed. It resulted in an All-American career at Oregon State, which ultimately led to the New Orleans Saints selecting him with the No. 14 pick of the 2024 NFL Draft on Thursday.
Fuaga has rare physical gifts. His movement skills do not often come in 6-foot-5, 324-pound packages, and he owns top-end play strength. But what brought him to New Orleans was his dedication to unlocking the best version of himself.
Put another way by former Oregon State offensive line coach Jim Michalczik, it was Fuaga’s maturity that set him apart.
“I’ve coached a long time, and there are very few guys — he’s in that elite, elite group — the maturity to practice every day in a way that is going to translate to the game,” said Michalczik, who took a job at Michigan State this offseason. “A lot of guys go through practice and they don’t have the focus, they don’t have the determination, the drive to understand that this rep is the most important rep to get ready for the game.”
Fuaga has been on Avaava’s radar for a long time. A former college fullback at Boise State, Avaava has spent nearly 40 years training youth football players all over the country. He lives in western Washington, but he considers Hawaii his base of operations and works with a lot of Polynesian kids. He first learned of Fuaga from a nephew, who coached Fuaga in youth football.
When Avaava got his hands on him, Fuaga was early in his high school career. His earliest impressions of Fuaga were of him as a goofball child. It was fun thinking back on those early days this week, when he watched the first round of the draft with people who remembered that younger version of Fuaga in Washington.
“People at our draft party were like, ‘Yeah, I remember all the times you cussed him out in front of us, and he looked like he was going to fall apart,’ ” Avaava said. “But I tell them, ‘Sometimes you have to get into their faces to make them realize what they have available before they miss the opportunity.’ ”
Fuaga realized the possibility of his potential just in time. He worked with Avaava on his fundamental understanding of the game and the rhythms within it. When to be aggressive, and when to wait on the defender to come to you. How to get his strength and agility to work for him.
The results came quickly. Fuaga and a group of Avaava’s kids went to an Oregon recruiting showcase and dominated, and Fuaga received an offer from the University of Oregon. Not long after, an offer came in from Oregon State.
The validation fueled the work, and Fuaga started to set his sights higher.
That fall, during Fuaga’s senior year at Mount Tahoma High School, another Polynesian offensive lineman dominated college football. Oregon’s Penei Sewell won the Outland Trophy in 2019, given annually to the nation’s top offensive or defensive lineman.
Avaava saw another teaching moment.
“I told him Penei is great, but he earned it,” Avaava said. “He earned everything and he deserved everything he got. I told him your fat ass can have every opportunity if you put your mind to it, if we make this focus and be passionate about it, you have every opportunity to do the same.
“He nods and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to go.’ ”
Fuaga arrived at Oregon State in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. He didn’t earn a starting role until his third season there. But he kept plugging away, and when his time came, he did not let the opportunity out of his powerful grasp.
Each step in the process allowed him to polish his résumé. He earned all-conference honors in his first season as a starter. He developed a reputation as a punishing run blocker, earning the coveted “nasty” and “mean streak” qualifiers in the scouting process.
“He’s a hunter, so you get him on the back side of these outside zones going in the other direction, he’s just looking to knock people down,” NFL analyst Brian Baldinger said. “You get him downfield, he’s knocking people down. You know, he’s a finisher. I don’t know if he hears a whistle”
By the time his collegiate career was over, it was evident he was a skilled pass protector, too — he never gave up a sack in college. He more than held his own against UCLA’s Laiatu Latu, the first defensive player taken in this year’s draft.
And then, when NFL scouts came in to check on the person, they would hear stuff like this from Michalczik:
“His talent is way up there, but it’s more than that. It’s his work ethic, it’s the maturity. He’s a little quiet, but the guys on the team like him and respect him. I think he is that guy that people kind of follow without saying a lot.
"One of the stories when I recruited him out of high school, I went to his high school to find out more about him, and one of the stories they told me was after school before practice, all the kids would be hanging out in the quad and they’d all be joking around. Then all of a sudden Tali would just start walking toward the football field, and everybody would follow him.”
Those types of qualities are what drew the Saints to him.
The impressive game film and NFL combine measurables obviously needed to be there for the Saints to even consider him at No. 14, but then there was everything else to consider. For a team that openly lamented some of its cultural issues at the end of the 2023 season, New Orleans saw an opportunity to rebuild some of what it lost in Fuaga.
“He’s a culture-builder type of personality,” Saints coach Dennis Allen said. “Obviously we liked what we saw on the tape, then we sat down and had an interview with him at the combine and really fell in love with him because we felt like he was our type of person.”
As he kept going on about Fuaga’s personality, Allen described him as “one of the more mature people we talked to.”
That’s no surprise at all to Avaava. He saw it all those years ago, and he remembers the feeling of his heart opening up when he thought, “My kid finally woke up.”
There was potentially a different path waiting for Fuaga, one there would’ve been nothing wrong with. But the one he ended up taking will never leave him wondering about what might’ve been.
“If it’s the Marines you wish to go, you can always go there,” Avaava recalled. “But you have some options. So make the damn time commitment to be consistent enough to show up and make this thing happen. And he did.”