This Documentary About Patriots OL Hjalte Froholdt of Denmark is Compelling and Rich. I'm Completely Serious.

One thing they didn’t teach us in Blogging School was anything along the lines of “If you really want to increase your pageviews, post a 17-minute documentary about an offensive lineman spoken entirely in Danish with English subtitles. That’s just the sort of clickbait that puts eyeballs on the screen.”

So yeah, even as I post this I realize that for a lot of people, it’s going to be like that time you were trying to impress a girl in your blowoff Film Appreciation class by watching an Ingmar Bergman so you could at least get some 2nd-base-under-the-sweater action. This one will have a decidedly small, niche audience of hardcore Patriots fans and the sorts of people who like football so much they enjoy getting under the hood, taking the engine apart and seeing how it all works.

I guess I’m in the intersection of those two subsets on the Venn Diagram because I loved this. As a refresher, Hjatle Froholdt is the guard our of Arkansas the Patriots’ took with their sixth selection, taken in Round 4, just after tackle Yodny Cajuste. Making that 4th round sound less like they were lookiing for offensive line depth than they were shopping for a dining room set at IKEA. But his is an interesting story.

Growing up in Denmark, of all damned places. Wanting to play rugby by the nearest team was 45 minutes away so he chose American football. Then not having an American football team anywhere in the area so he formed a club of his own, that started with just four kids. And parlaying that all the way to the SEC. If you watch no other part, skip to the 13:30 mark, Day 3 of the draft when they put him on the phone first with Bret Bielema and then Bill Belichick and he loses his composure. That alone will be worth the time of the casual fan.

After watching this, I have a new appreciation for Froholdt’s story. Once camp begins next week, most of the attention will be caught in the gravitational pull of N’Keal Harry, Joejuan Williams and Chase Winovich, just due to the positions they play. But after watching the way Sebastian Vollmer went from Germany to U. of Houston to a 2nd round pick (considered a reach by just about everyone) to the best right tackle in football, I’ll be looking forward to seeing how this Viking warrior develops once Dante Scarnecchia gets to work on him.

Thanks for clicking. Moving forward, I promise I’ll try to keep my foreign language documentaries about interior linemen to a minimum.