The 2026 NFL draft opens Thursday night, and the latest mock projections put former Iowa and Iowa State players in the middle of the action before the first round even gets rolling. Logan Jones is part of a crop that draft analysts expect to hear called across the three-day event, with the second and third rounds set for Friday night and rounds 4-7 on Saturday.
Brugler’s full seven-round mock includes seven Hawkeyes and one Cyclone, a sign of how heavily the two programs are represented in this year’s projections. Iowa guard Gennings Dunker is projected at No. 56 in the second round to Jacksonville, while Iowa State defensive tackle Domonique Orange is pegged at No. 57 to Chicago, putting the two Big 12 and Big Ten rivals in adjacent spots near the top of the second night.
The projections do not stop there. Jordan Reid added former Hawkeye kicker Drew Stevens as a seventh-round pick in The Athletic’s mock, and NFL.com draft analyst Chad Reuter also has Dunker as the first former Hawkeye or Cyclone off the board. Together, the mocks suggest the best-known names from Iowa City and Ames could start coming off the board early Friday and continue through Saturday.
That matters because these are not final selections, only forecasts built from what evaluators see now. Brugler, Reid and Reuter are all working from the same broad draft landscape, but their boards still leave room for the kind of movement that can turn a late-second-round projection into a surprise first-night slide or push a seventh-round name into undrafted territory.
For Logan Jones and the rest of Iowa’s and Iowa State’s draft class hopefuls, the next few days will show whether the mock momentum holds when the draft actually starts Thursday night.
