Center · Miami Dolphins

Jim Bonifas

No. 62 · Rookie

He arrived as a quarterback. He left as a captain.

Jim Bonifas showed up at Dubuque Senior High School tall and thin, trying to play quarterback. Over the next few years, he added roughly 60 pounds and remade himself into an offensive lineman — the kind his high school coach Dale Ploessl apparently saw coming before anyone else did.

Ploessl's prediction, as Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell later recounted it, was that Bonifas would become one of the best leaders in the locker room. That's a specific thing to say about a teenager still figuring out his position. It turned out to be accurate.

Bonifast grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, playing three sports at the same high school — basketball, track and field, football. He earned all-conference honors in basketball and lettered in track. Iowa State offered him in November of his junior year, two weeks after Louisville opened his recruitment. He committed to the Cyclones in February 2020, choosing them over Louisville, Northern Illinois, and South Dakota State.

At Iowa State he studied Personal Finance and made the Big 12 Commissioner's Honor Roll every semester he was enrolled. The National Football Foundation's Hampshire Honor Society, which requires a cumulative GPA of 3.2 or better through the end of eligibility, inducted him in 2025. The football part of his college career ran its own complicated line: he started all 13 games at center in 2023, lost the job in 2024, then won it back in 2025. That last season, Iowa State named him a team captain for three games.

The 2026 NFL Draft came and went without his name being called. The same night it ended, the Miami Dolphins signed him as an undrafted free agent.

Coach Ploessl saw it years before Miami did. He just had to wait for everyone else to catch up.

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