Just as the Wildcard kept close tabs on Jarryd Hayne's NFL excursion, I'm going to roll with Jason Taumalolo and Valentine Holmes as they ride the NFL wave. Stage one of this journey was the announcement that the two NRL jokers would be having work outs for NFL scouts and after putting aside the initial shock, many people questioned whether these two would be able to grasp the different sport quickly enough to make an impact on scouts from a variety of NFL teams.

Stage two is headlined by a greater sense of optimism as Taumalolo and Holmes apparently impressed those who watched, which now has NFL teams stepping up their pursuit of the pair. What excites me the most about this entire yarn, is that it's a long-term story and as the are both under contract for next season, not a whole lot will actually happen until possibly 2018 or late 2017.

With that in mind, we need to offer some context around these work outs as they definitely aren't 'trials' with specific teams. That slight difference in the language used by mainstream media is crucial as Taumalolo and Holmes were put through a series of drills to test their athletic ability. We know they are both freakish athletes, however footage of Holmes doing drills that have more of a focus on agility with sharp turns and short bursts points to a different athletic requirement in the NFL.

It shouldn't come as any great surprise that NFL scouts were impressed by what they saw because we've seen just how gifted these blokes are, week after week in the NRL.

As I heard Taumalolo and Holmes explain their decision to work out for NFL scouts, I encountered a minor epiphany. The first revolved around the idea that athletes in the United States of America are often put on a pedastal in terms of their physical attributes and athletic ability. Taumalolo and Holmes genuinely want to put themselves up against that standard and see how they measure up, offering us a different perspective on how to view this whole situation; how do our NRL guys compare to their NFL guys?

Give me NRL footy over NFL every day of the week and with that personal bias in my back-pack, I want to see some NFL geezers understand that we've got the goods down here as well.

The NFL scouts now have numbers and Americans love their numbers. While we tend to evaluate players in our part of the world via intangibles like their footwork, offloading ability or sheer aggression, in the NFL it's all about your 40-yard dash time. That's mainly because we're a bit behind the times down here and we're only just getting fully into sports science and getting game-plans on the iPad, while that's the norm in the NFL. Before anything could happen, the NFL teams needed data on Taumalolo and Holmes, not just reports on what they had done in the NRL.

And those reports were apparently frequent throughout the season. NFL scouts had kept a close eye on Taumalolo and Holmes before requesting a work out, offering a sniff of some NFL footy. If you're Taumalolo and you've won an NRL Premiership, represented Aotearoa and done the Players Champion/Dally M double and your agent tells you NFL scouts what to test you out, boom, there's not much thinking that needs to be done there. Holmes is in a similar position having just won a Premiership and representing Australia.

Taumalolo and Holmes didn't hunt down the NFL, the NFL came hunting for them. Which also highlights how the NFL is open-minded in bringing in athletes from other countries/sports to try it out. Taumalolo and Holmes could go on to work out with specific NFL teams, however this was a general work out hosted by the NFL with scouts invited to have a gander.

Worrying about positions at these stage is pointless because Taumalolo and Holmes will probably be happy to follow orders, playing where they are told they might go alright. We'll now wait to see what's next for these two and work outs with specific NFL teams will offer a better insight into their chances of making a squad sometime and how they are being evaluated.

Until then, a few key points...

Of course NRL people are going to roll out the 'the NRL can't lose these blokes' narrative. Taumalolo and Holmes are just like every other NRL player as they are replaceable, there's always youngsters coming through who will take their place.

Relax on NFL scouts being 'impressed'. Duh, Taumalolo's a beast and Holmes can scoot.

It's cool that these two can try out the NFL and then slot back into their NFL pre-season training. This is effectively their leisure time as they would have been given a few weeks off after the end of the Four Nations before they were required to re-join the Cowboys and Sharks respectively.

In other words; Taumalolo and Holmes are giving up their holidays for this.