Kicker · Las Vegas Raiders
Kansei Matsuzawa
No. 38 · Rookie
He watched one Raiders game, then spent three years learning how to kick.
Kansei Matsuzawa's father played quarterback at a Japanese university once, then quit after a season and barely touched the subject again for three decades. Football was not the plan for this family. It was barely in the air.
Then Kansei failed the national college entrance exam that would have let him keep playing soccer, and the future he'd been building collapsed. He was nineteen. He traveled to the United States in 2018 — a tourist, not a player — and ended up at the Oakland Coliseum on a Monday night for a Raiders-Rams game. He knew two NFL players by name going in: Joe Montana and Tom Brady, neither of whom was playing.
He left knowing what he wanted to do.
He found Jason Myers kicking on YouTube and watched until he understood the mechanics. Then he found a public park in Tokyo with a net and started teaching himself. No coach. No team. No field. Just clips and a net and whatever repetition he could fit into the days around shifts at Morton's Steakhouse, where he worked for three years to save enough money to actually move.
When he'd filmed enough footage, he emailed it to American college programs. One wrote back: Hocking College, a junior college in Nelsonville, Ohio. He enrolled in 2021 speaking almost no English. He learned the language watching Friends and Star Wars.
Before Hocking, he'd needed field time to build the tape at all. He went to the Fujitsu Frontiers — a semipro program in Japan's X League — and offered to do whatever they needed in exchange for access to their field after practice. Filming, cleaning, whatever. They took him up on it.
The path from a Tokyo steakhouse to a junior college in Ohio to a Division I program at Hawaii is not a path anyone drew for him. In the most literal sense, he assembled it piece by piece while waiting tables and watching YouTube.
In April 2026, after going undrafted, the Las Vegas Raiders called. Matsuzawa became the first Japanese-born player ever signed by an NFL franchise. His special teams coordinator at Hawaii FaceTimed him minutes after the draft and found him already holding a Raiders helmet.
Content sourced from publicly available information. Gripd is an independent fan platform not affiliated with the NFL or any team.