Seven Up: NFL Draft prospects who rose to the occasion in the last week of the regular season
Which other 2026 NFL Draft prospects join Oregon's Dillon Thieneman in this week's edition of Seven Up?
Welcome to the second-to-last edition of Seven Up of the 2026 NFL Draft cycle. With this weekend being Army-Navy and conference championship games, I have one more week of notable games to really break down and highlight standouts from.
Week 14 was a fun one, though. We saw games with both conference championship and playoff implications come down to the wire and enjoyed some upsets. These games carry NFL Draft implications as some potential top-50 players took the field in key resume games.
So, who rose to the occasion for their respective teams and saw their stock tick in the upward direction as a result? Not every player mentioned here will be a top pick, and some might not even declare!
However, a standout is a standout. Let’s roll.
Oregon safety Dillon Thieneman had a day in the win over Washington.
After what I thought was a slow start to his season, Thieneman has become the safety that Oregon envisioned he would be as one of the top names in the transfer portal a year ago. That interception to seal the win over Penn State felt like a breakthrough moment for Thieneman’s season.
It’s been an upward trajectory from there. And in the win over the Huskies, Thieneman was all over the field. In this game, Thieneman had three stop tackles, a sack, and an interception for the Ducks.
Thieneman’s usage has been a shock to the system this year at Oregon compared to what he was doing as a freshman at Purdue. He was almost exclusively a rangy free safety in 2023 with the Boilermakers, and still was predominantly a free safety last year too. This year, however, Thieneman has been deployed mainly as a split safety and one who frequently drops down into the box as a robber.
I have an early third round grade on Thieneman, who will likely end the cycle as a top-50 player on my board. His tracking data and reported times from Bruce Feldman’s Freaks List indicate his stock will continue to climb once the games stop as well.