Fernando Mendoza: Locked-In No. 1 Pick or Overrated?
I charted every throw Fernando Mendoza made against Power Four opponents (pre-College Football Playoff). The results were surprising.
There isn’t a position in sports more challenging to project than the quarterback position. Ask all the NFL teams who have swung and missed on a “bust-proof” prospect. Sure, there are the players who are destined for greatness: Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck, Trevor Lawrence, Caleb Williams, and many others. But when destiny is unclear, such is the case with all the potential 2026 quarterbacks, the evaluation becomes murky. College offenses function in ways that emulate a completely different sport than the NFL, and sifting through physical and mental traits to determine which quarterbacks can meet the moment once they’re under center for an NFL team is why front office and head coach turnover remains high.
Fernando Mendoza just put on a clinic against Alabama in the College Football Playoff, fresh off his Heisman Trophy win. He’s widely considered the clear No. 1 pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. I charted every throw he made against Power Four opponents (excluding the College Football Playoff performance) and came away with a few conclusions. I also created a new weighted accuracy metric to provide more context for quarterbacks in the 2026 class and beyond.
How He Wins
Mendoza is a supremely accurate player. His ball placement, especially in the short areas of the field, is outstanding. A quick five-yard out is essentially a handoff in most situations, and his ability to get the ball out quickly is impressive. He has a strong arm, though not elite, and can push the ball to the boundaries with ease, even from the opposite hash. Those throws should give evaluators confidence that he’ll be able to maintain his arm strength at the NFL level, considering the wider hashes at the college level. Mendoza diagnoses defenses well pre-snap and consistently understands where the ball needs to go. Indiana runs a fair amount of RPOs and play-action passes, and Mendoza avoided plenty of sacks with his quick reads and early recognition of defensive indicators. Over the last few years, we’ve seen quarterbacks try to do too much: fitting the ball into tight windows when it’s not there, scrambling to extend a play for a second too long, and other potentially detrimental situations. Mendoza likes to make the game easy. He’s willing to take a sack instead of putting the ball into harm’s way, and he doesn’t have the lateral agility to make a whole lot happen within the pocket. While we’ll discuss that later, I can make a case that his straight-line-only athleticism makes him a higher-IQ player.
Mendoza is superb at throwing behind the line of scrimmage, up to 10 yards. His on-target percentage in those areas is 83.99%, with throws to the boundaries resulting in an even higher percentage: 84.82%. Like any quarterback, those numbers drop as the field stretches, but his accuracy in these areas exceeds what Drake Maye put on tape in his final season at North Carolina. The sample of the throws in these areas is vast, as Indiana runs a fairly conservative passing attack, chipping away at defenses with a strong run game and short throws before unleashing star wideouts Elijah Sarratt and Omar Cooper Jr. (and lately, sophomore Charlie Becker) for chunk gains in big moments. While the intermediate passing doesn’t quite hold up against the short game, Mendoza put some special throws on film this year. His pre-snap diagnosing led to some impressive middle-of-the-field, driven throws. They weren’t as frequent, but the signs of growth from his time at California were apparent. Oh, and speaking of big moments…
Anyone who followed college football this season saw Mendoza operate in the clutch at an awe-inspiring rate. In Week 11 against Penn State, Mendoza had a fadeaway prayer of a game-winning touchdown to Cooper. A few weeks later, in the Big Ten Championship, Mendoza unleashed a deep ball from the opposite hash to put the nail in Ohio State’s coffin. In his College Football Playoff debut, Mendoza was on fire, operating as efficiently as anyone — probably including himself — could have hoped. He has the clutch gene, and no moment has been too big for him yet. His next game against Oregon is a big test, as the Oregon defense put the clamps on an explosive Texas Tech offense in the quarterfinal.
