Iowa football: Four biggest draft busts in Hawkeyes history

The Iowa football team has a storied tradition of producing quality NFL talent, but here are four guys who didn’t quite pan out as expected.

To be fair to these guys, this isn’t us ragging on them. After all, they did play football at the highest level in the world, the NFL, and before that, they had successful careers with the Iowa football program. Based on where they were drafted, however, they failed to live up to expectations.

What was interesting about writing this article is when I was doing research, it was tough to find players who actually underperformed based on their draft position, and also, what is considered underperforming? It can be only playing a few seasons or for skill position players it can be never reaching certain “expected” milestones, or it can be never making it to the big contract.

For the Iowa football program though, they are more likely to have a late round success than an early round misses coming from the team. It’s just how the program operates. The Iowa football team, historically, hasn’t been built on the top recruits across the nation. These are guys that had to work their butts off to even get to college football. Those guys often don’t fail because of a lack of trying at the next level, and more often than not, they aren’t high-round draft picks either.

There have been just nine first-round selections in the Kirk Ferentz era if you factor in this past weekends draft when TJ Hockenson and Noah Fant both went in the first so there weren’t a ton of early round options to choose from here.

Yet, we were still able to come up with a solid list of four guys who underperformed given expectations and draft position. Here they are.