Iowa football: Two Hawks go in 1st round of FanSided mock draft

It’s the time of the season for NFL mock drafts, and the latest FanSided mock has two Iowa football players being selected in the first round.

With NFL Draft season heating up, you can surely expect us to provide you breaking coverage on each reputable mock draft’s prediction as to where former Iowa football players will go. Earlier this week we gave you the run down of Matt Miller’s seven round mock draft that featured five Hawks. Now, in one of the most recent mock drafts posted, NFL Mock’s Site Expert Sayre Bedinger has two Hawkeyes finding their NFL homes in round one.

As you can imagine, both of these Iowa football players happen play tight end.

In this mock draft, we see TJ Hockenson heading to the Seattle Seahawks with the 21st pick of the first round and Noah Fant heading to the Super Bowl losing Los Angeles Rams with the 31st pick of the first round.

The Seahawks would make for an intriguing location for the redshirt sophomore tight end from Chariton, Iowa. Quarterback Russel Wilson has played most of his career without many viable receiving threats, and once Seattle let Jimmy Graham walk, Wilson was left with a pretty bare cupboard at the tight end position.

Last season, four different tight ends caught a pass for the Seahawks. They combined for 50 catches for 590 yards and eight touchdowns which is seven less catches, 70 more yards, and two less touchdowns than Graham alone accounted for in the 2017 season. Hockenson could be a huge threat in the passing game for the mobile Wilson and provide a serious upgrade over last year’s dismal receiving squad.

Fant heading to the Los Angeles Rams would make the leagues second best offense even richer, and it would give offensive mastermind Sean McVay another mismatch to tinker with week in and week out. Although it’s not exactly a position of need for the defending NFC Champions, it would certainly make that offense even more explosive than it already is, and Bedinger noted as much in his analysis of the situation.

"The Rams don’t exactly have a need at the tight end position but Noah Fant is a phenomenal athlete and imagining him in Sean McVay’s offense is really something."

Wherever these two tight ends end up, those NFL teams just hit the jackpot.

Fant and Hockenson are going to be making plays in the NFL for years to come.