MOBILE, Ala. — Central Michigan OT Bernhard Raimann started out like many of his Austrian friends as kids, playing the other football, what we call soccer in the United States.
But soccer wasn’t cutting it for the oversized, underwhelmed Raimann at age 13.
“I was kind of getting sick of soccer,” Raimann said Wednesday at the 2022 Senior Bowl. “It wasn’t physical enough for me. I was looking for something new.”
After his father had moved into a new house near Vienna, Raimann walked outside one day and saw his new friends throwing around “an egg-shaped ball that to that point I hadn’t even seen before.”
Before long, Raimann joined in — and pretty quickly was fascinated with a sport many Austrians don’t play.
“We threw the ball around, and I said, ‘Hey, might as well try it now,’” Raimann said.
And he was all in, almost immediately. Raimann did some research and found the local club football team — the Vienna Vikings. On his 14th birthday, he tried out for the team … as a wide receiver.
This was the sport Raimann decided to commit to, eventually entering a high-school exchange program and ending up in Michigan to play the sport. He was so infatuated with it that he binged on football movies, too, watching whatever he could find.
“That was the dream back then,” he said. “Hey, I want to play under the ‘Friday Night Lights.’ I thought it was going to be awesome, and it was.”
By the end of high school, he was receiving attention from colleges as a recruit, mostly in the state of Michigan. Raimann committed to Central Michigan over “a school in the western part of Michigan we don’t want to talk about,” he said with a smile.
That would be Western Michigan, the Chippewas’ biggest rivals. You can say that Raimann now is fully entrenched in football — and the friendly trash talk that comes with it.
The position…
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