Why Fernando Mendoza’s Rise to the Toughest Spot in Football Could Shake Up the Entire Draft – And What He’s Really Thinking About It
Ever wonder what it takes to be a giant in a tiny room? Fernando Mendoza knows all about that — a towering presence squeezed into a small conference space, yet commanding attention like no other. This guy is not just any quarterback; he’s an improbable national champion, a Heisman Trophy winner, and the soon-to-be first pick in the NFL draft. But behind those highlights lies a man juggling the relentless glare of the “fishbowl”: legions of fans, analysts, and critics breathing down his neck at an age when most are still figuring out their next move. What’s his secret? Systems, faith, and an unyielding hunger that keeps him locked in a fierce dance with destiny. Think it’s easy? Think again. Mendoza’s story is a masterclass in discipline, faith, and relentless self-belief— proving sometimes, it’s not just about talent but about how well you handle the chaos swirling all around you. Ready to dig in? LEARN MORE
13 min read
The room is too small for him. Even when he’s sitting, his presence overwhelms the space almost comically. Fernando Mendoza, the improbable national champion, unquestioned Heisman Trophy winner, and soon-to-be number-one NFL draft pick, is immured in a conference room in an office park in Irvine, California, at Excel Sports Management, the agency to which he has entrusted his future, talking about the daily drills and exercises he’s doing to make himself a better quarterback. There’s an idle flat-screen hanging on one wall, a whiteboard and some dry-erase markers, errant water bottles, and an Office Depot table with swivel chairs, one of which he is swiveling in.
Mendoza is explaining how he’s handling what they call the fishbowl, through which masses of people are watching him, analyzing him, prognosticating about him, doubting him, praising him, and expecting unreasonably high achievements from him at an age when he still gets carded. These masses include football fans broadly, of course. In his case, more specifically, they include fans at Cal, who wish he’d played all four years there instead of just two; fans at Indiana University, where he transferred for the 2025 season, his final year of eligibility, the year that made him; the front office of the Las Vegas Raiders (including part owner Tom Brady), the team that appears certain to draft Mendoza with its number-one pick; Catholic and Cuban American communities back in Miami, where he grew up; TV analysts and online columnists; and stud high school quarterbacks in every corner of America who believe they too might rise up to become a star through hard work and prayer.
This article appeared in the Sept 2025 issue of Esquire
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It’s a lot. In delineating his coping strategy, Mendoza speaks with urgency and speed, like a kid who just got home from school and wants to tell you what happened on the bus. He says:
“I’m very process based, which means I really like to make systems. I set a goal and I kind of work backwards to it. So I say, Hey, what do I got to get better at to be the best quarterback in September? I gotta work this, this, this. And then for each one, I’ll put a system in place. So for example, nutrition. I need to elevate my nutrition if I want to be at a certain weight. So, hey, how can I do that with a system? And that system is: One, hey, let’s adopt a new nutrition habit every one to two months. So, very tangible. And it might be like, for example, no fried foods. No desserts. I create a regimen. Or, for another example, footwork. I gotta get my feet faster. So I put a system in place, and I’m doing fifty to one hundred drops a day.”
The question was What have they got you doing each day?
Ninety-nine hot-shit quarterback prospects out of a hundred would have said something like “Working on my footwork drills, focusing on my nutrition, things like that.” Next question.
Mendoza answers questions that haven’t been asked, explains his answers when no explanation was requested, then provides multiple examples when zero would’ve been the norm and one would have been plenty.
The next question is one of clarification: Drops?
“Footwork drops.”
He pushes his chair back from the table, fingers splayed out, and it’s the first time you see the strength in his hands. Then he stands, his six-foot-five frame unfolding like a giant mantis, and hunches, pretending to take a snap from an invisible center, right here in the little whiteboard room.
“You know, like you do on every play.”
Sweater by Ferragamo.
His feet hopscotch as imaginary tackles fend off imaginary linebackers. His elbow is cocked, and he holds an imaginary ball in his right hand. His eyes focus through the plate-glass windows, as if searching the parking lot outside for a receiver. All of this happens in three, maybe four seconds. Then he repeats the motion, hunching to take another snap, only this time, when he drops back, his feet do a little fake-out motion, this way then that. He does it again, then again, each time moving his feet in a fractionally different way as his eyes mimic searching for someone to throw it to, his feet a blur against the blah industrial carpet.
You getting this? Instead of stopping at “You know, like you do on every play,” he expounds, he moves, he demonstrates, he coaches you up.
“Fifty to a hundred of those a day. Drop-backs. Because there’s different variations of that. You want to become more efficient in that and more stable.”
There it is again. Even after performing a demonstration of an example he wasn’t asked to provide, he’s not satisfied. He’s got to add that one last “Because . . .” to land the explanation, to make sure you’ve understood. He’s got to fully translate the challenge of improving his footwork, meet the moment, render the thing, answer the question.
Shirt and ties by Celine; shorts by Adidas; shoes by Christian Louboutin; socks by Bombas; watch by Cartier.
The world is spinning fast for Fernando Mendoza these days, and this is how he holds on. He controls what he can control, because the good Lord knows there are a lot of people—in this office; in the Raiders offices; in the offices of Adidas, with whom he signed a multiyear endorsement deal; and in the offices of lawyers and financial planners and the other stars in the constellation of handlers and packagers that tends to gather around the shoo-in number-one pick—who are making decisions about his life without his input, sometimes even without his knowledge.
The closer he gets to the draft in April, the tighter he holds on. Which means devising ever more systems and explanations, because if you loosen that grip with a tenth of your pinkie, you’ll be running a car dealership in two years.
Mendoza speaks not in words and sentences but in sentences and paragraphs. In the world of hot-shit quarterbacks, in the world of emerging celebrities trying to avoid a misstep, this is unusual. Mendoza might look like a Peyton Manning or a Tom Brady or an Eli Manning. And in some ways, sure. His throwing accuracy can make you blink in disbelief, and he’s tall and quick and his hands are like iron claws. We’ve seen all of that before. To learn what’s different about Mendoza, you have to listen. Peyton could always gas on pretty good, charming but a little fizzy. Brady, when he played, said about as much as the shy kid at recess.
Shirt and ties by Celine.
Fernando Mendoza has something to say. He doesn’t just want to explain things; he needs to.
And what I mean by that is . . .
And so . . .
For example. . .
He sits back down now, the hydraulics of the swivel chair wheezing under his 235 pounds.
“I always try to have a hunter mindset instead of the hunted mindset. So right now I try to compare myself to one out of thirty-two potential starting NFL quarterbacks—and I’m not even drafted by a team and I don’t have a starting position. But you want to stay hungry.”
He just says this, in response to no particular question, except of course the obvious existential ones: How do you explain the inexplicable, and how do you handle the unknown? How do you prepare yourself for what’s coming next?
Shirt, jumpsuit, and metal keys by Calvin Klein Collection; boots by Christian Louboutin; watch by Cartier.
In the third or fourth grade, Mendoza was learning his multiplication tables. He couldn’t do them perfectly on the first few tries, and he didn’t know that that was okay, that no one can. He filled them out again and again, trying to get more answers correct. He made flash cards. He asked his mother for extra workbooks. Eight-year-old Mendoza made systems, which he put in place until he got them all right.
His mother, Elsa, laughs talking about this. “He’s not a mediocre type of guy,” she says.
It makes for a tidy story, that he was always this way, but in Mendoza’s case it appears to be the true story. There’s a video of him at age thirteen or so that’s surfaced on YouTube, in which another kid asks him what it takes to win, and Mendoza says, “It just takes hard work and determination. I think the whole team helped . . .”—earnest, generous, adorable.
But Mendoza’s life has not been, as he puts it, “all sunshine and rainbows.” When he was twelve, his parents told him that Elsa had a disease called multiple sclerosis. “I didn’t really understand it,” he says. “I wasn’t dismissive of it; I just didn’t know what it was.” For a few years she was okay, or at least looked okay to her son, but her MS worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic and she lost her ability to walk. She had chemotherapy, which helped her illness but also brought its own pain. Mendoza’s father, Fernando Sr., is a pediatric emergency doctor, and when he was at the hospital Mendoza often found himself not only handling more work to keep the household running—“taking a leadership role,” in Mendoza-speak—but sometimes having to physically carry his mother around the house or to the car. He drove his younger brother Max to and from school and music lessons.
It was the only time in his life when his abiding faith in God was rattled by something he didn’t understand. “It’s tough, and you can get mad,” he says. “I was like, why?” It’s an unanswerable question, but for Mendoza, there couldn’t not be an answer. His answers in life tend to come from his family or from his faith, and in this case it was faith, the ritual practice of committing yourself to explanations, justifications, rationalizations, instructions, and reasons. The answer he was looking for lay in what he says is his favorite Bible verse, Proverbs 16:9:
A man’s heart plans his way
But the Lord directs his steps.
Shirt and metal keys by Calvin Klein Collection.
“It basically talks about how the will of God is always going to be above the desire of a man,” he says. A person can make plans and hope for all good things, but if your plan doesn’t work out, and if some of those good things don’t happen, you must have faith that God’s plan is better. You must believe this even if in the moment, when you’re watching your mother lie in bed racked with nausea or exhaustion or pain, God’s plan doesn’t seem like a very good plan at all.
“Having that rock-solid faith has helped me stay rock-solid,” Mendoza says. “That’s the way my mother wants my brothers and I to live, and that’s how we live. It’s freeing in that aspect. My parents’ example of how they built us has been through faith. Unwavering faith.”
How they built us.
Mendoza’s postgame interviews have become famous for the ample gratitude he gives to the Lord God and Jesus Christ for helping him and his team score touchdowns.
“That’s a little different type of faith,” he says.
Doesn’t giving glory to God after a win take credit away from his own work, his team’s work, the time they put in training and practicing?
“I would say it’s through Him,” Mendoza says without hesitation. “Without Him I wouldn’t be in this position.”
He continues.
“It’s about the opportunity and Him enabling me to capitalize on opportunity. It gives me strength in the game knowing, hey, this plan’s already in place. God already knows what’s going to happen.”
He goes on, chapter and verse.
“Some people are critical of this and they say, Hey, it’s you who’s throwing the touchdown pass, not God. But so many things need to go right in a game beyond a single pass. I believe that without God or Jesus Christ, we wouldn’t have won this national championship. That’s why I always try to give Him shout-outs.”
Coat by Dolce & Gabbana; sweatshirt by Adidas.
You can’t win without a quarterback. You hire a gun, you build a team around him. That’s the thinking in the NFL.
Before the 2011 collective bargaining agreement imposed a rookie wage scale, Eli Manning could sign a six-year, $45 million deal after the Giants landed him in the 2004 draft. Then there was Sam Bradford’s record $78 million contract with the St. Louis Rams in 2010, which probably helped bring about the wage scale. Mendoza won’t make Bradford money. The Raiders’ calculus is, Let’s sign this phenom at the scale-prescribed salary, then spend on giving him a solid supporting cast. If Mendoza is killing it in a few years, we’ll re-sign him for more money.
“Context matters. One kid coming out of college cannot solve all the problems that have plagued a franchise for decades,” says Seth Wickersham, a veteran ESPN writer and the author of American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, the definitive treatise on the pinnacle of sport. “But then the other part of it is expectation, and it’s impossible to know who can handle it and who can’t. Tom Brady has talked often about how it was such a benefit to be under the radar as a rookie. No one was watching him. Nobody expected anything from him. He could learn and make mistakes and throw passes.”
Mendoza doesn’t have that luxury. He’s in the fishbowl—but not for the first time. When he left for Indiana, he had one year of eligibility, zero certainty that this was the right decision, and a bunch of new teammates he hadn’t played with.
“It was a dark moment, very lonely. Very tough leaving all my friends at Cal,” he says. “And it was demeaning, some of the rumors and lies that were said about me. ‘He’s a traitor,’ things like that. That stuff really hurt me, because you try to make those relationships and then they get dwindled out. And that sucks.”
His brother Alberto, who was already at Indiana and played backup behind him, showed him around campus and went over the playbook with him. At Cal he had his “non-football” friends, but at Indiana he spent most of his time with the team, often playing Catan and Monopoly. In talking about this he brings up—unbidden—the question of whether the transfer would aid his dream of playing in the NFL or kill it. It’s like he’s running checkdowns in the pocket.
“I was taking a big risk on myself. Maybe I’m gonna look like an idiot if I swing for the fences and I whiff,” he says. “What if Cal has a better season than I do at Indiana? Or what if I just don’t pan out and everyone’s like, Why did you even leave? Not only do you maybe burn the bridge you left on; you also have a mountain to climb in front of you because, New quarterback, new expectations.”
He is asking questions, reflecting on them, asking you to imagine them. He was built to conjure ways to overcome challenges, and to overcome challenges you have to understand what the challenge is—its essence—so that maybe you can improvise ways to meet it. And maybe that’s how his mother’s illness helps him stand tall in the pocket. And maybe that’s what he needs to be true.
Elsa isn’t worried about her son handling the pressure. “He’s not scared of challenges,” she says. “He is willing to work to get to where he wants, and he knows it might not happen right away, just like it didn’t happen at Cal.”
Shirt, jumpsuit, and metal keys by Calvin Klein Collection; boots by Christian Louboutin; watch by Cartier.
Some Raiders fans will want to see Mendoza starting and winning games from the first snap. But in Brady, Mendoza will have someone in the owner’s box who understands that developing in the NFL takes time—and who probably sees some of his rookie self in Mendoza.
“Underneath all the polite and totally honest words Mendoza might say publicly from the podium, there’s a ruthless competitor who has to have a Brady-like level of unbreakable self-belief,” Wickersham says. “And that can be incredibly taxing. It can take these guys to incredibly dark places mentally. But however it is that they arrive there, they have to arrive there.”
Mendoza shows up for training six days a week at 7:00 a.m. and leaves at 6:30 or 7:00 at night. He calls his days “industrious” and “tenacious.” He eats no glazed doughnuts, which are his favorite. He will eat a tomato, though. Brady is one of his idols, and Brady will not eat a tomato—because it’s a seeded fruit, or something like that—but Mendoza is not that intense. If he’s out for Mexican and he gets a bowl of arroz picadillo, he’ll put salsa on it, he confesses.
Because, by the way, as much as he loves Tom Brady, this is Fernando Mendoza’s life and Fernando Mendoza’s story, and he’s doing it his way, which means, yes, listening to his trainers and his agent and his coaches and his parents and his brother and God but mostly to Fernando Mendoza. The guy talking. The guy running drills and demonstrating. He’s got a hundred little goals and a system in place for each, but he also has this one huge goal, and his whole life is a system designed to reach it, and he’s so close. The closer he gets, the tighter he holds on, because the tighter he holds on, the closer he gets. So here he is, working out in his head, in the presence of a reporter, how he balances being a super-dedicated quarterback prospect with not losing his mind:
“It’s a battle of discipline. I don’t believe in super balance; that’s just not how I am. I’m very type A—I believe the more inputs, the better outputs. But you do need some balance. You need to be maybe eighty to twenty—the eighty is football, the twenty is connecting with people. I don’t think you should be fifty to fifty. But the more you pour into relationships, whether it’s talking to my friends on the phone or hanging out with my roommates—that’s what I love. The relationships keep me on the straight path. Great relationships in the past and horrible relationships in the past—I was a bad friend maybe—how can I learn from that? Who are the people I want to surround myself with? In the craziness and the pressure of all of it, knowing that no matter if I throw five touchdowns or don’t play another down of football, these people will be my friends.”
Nothing makes sense about the fishbowl. It’s easy for us mortals to forget that these giant kids we see on television aren’t gods but other mortals, guys who get overwhelmed by everything the world expects of them, like we do, and whose heads spin at night as they wonder whether they can do it all. You can worry or you can work. You can let them write the story or set it down yourself. Mendoza’s got explanations. He’s got a system. He’s got religion. Just ask him.
Opening image: Hooded jacket by Louis Vuitton Men’s.
On the cover: Coat, jacket, shirt, and trousers by Bottega Veneta; socks by Bresciani 1970; shoes (in foreground) by Giuseppe Zanotti.
Photographed by Chantal Anderson @chantalaanderson
Styled by Alfonso Fernández Navas @Alfonsofn
Grooming by Dillon Peña at the Only Agency @dillonpena @theonly.agency
Esquire Executive Design Director: Martin Hoops @mhoopsdesign
Esquire Visual Director: James Morris @james_alexander_photo
Esquire Senior Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler @angcutt
Ryan D’Agostino is Editorial Director, Projects at Hearst, and previously served as Editor-in-Chief at Popular Mechanics and Articles Editor at Esquire.
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