'It's his superpower': Inside Fernando Mendoza's extraordinary rise to No. 1

Yes, Plough, tells them. When he is in front of a camera or in front of a locker or in front of the dining room table in Plough's home, he is always like this. He will talk you and thank you to death. He'll drill you with questions and take the conversation in winding ways and be courteous to the point of oh, wow, enough already. It's an acquired taste for some, Plough concedes, but it's more than that too. The way that Mendoza is? The way he always is?

"It's Fernando's superpower."

THE STORY OF Mendoza's time in Bloomington, which ended with a cascade of increasingly unfathomable feats -- the Heisman crowning, the Big Ten title, the national championship, the 16-0 record, and all this for Indiana (?!) -- was a fairytale starring a new kind of hero.

"He's not ..." Plough starts, then pauses, in search of the best way to put this gently. "He's not the cool guy."

So what is it, exactly? What uncool boxes is he checking? Corniness? ("Some people might think he is corny, but I think he's a blessing," former Hoosiers running back Roman Hemby says.) Nonconformity? ("Everyone gives him a hard time, myself included, that he's kind of nerdy," his old high school coach Dave Dunn says.) Stone-cold quirkiness? ("Sometimes he'd just say the stupidest stuff, and you're like, 'What are you talkin' about, dude,'" former Indiana tight end Riley Nowakowski says.) Check, check, check. It's not a bad package, they all say, just not your typical star (or starting) quarterback package. They sort of love it, in fact.

He calls wide receiver Charlie Becker "Chuck-o-nator," and calls Nowakowski something "not PG," and has absolutely no nickname for Curt Cignetti whatsoever, because he does not have a death wish. Cignetti, now going into his third season as Indiana's head coach, makes Bill Belichick look positively joyful. "Yeah, Cignetti's not a nicknames guy," Nowakowski says.

For all his quirks, Mendoza is quick to read a room. Or a sideline. Sometimes Nowakowski would steal a glance at Mendoza and Cignetti conferring in the middle of the game, and snicker at Mendoza's total, if temporary, transformation. The quarterback had to shift gears to disgruntled grouch in order to game plan.

"Nando would get super serious," he says. "Silent. It was like a completely different person."

His eccentricities have an off button. It's just that Mendoza's default setting is on, turned all the way up. Which works. It worked at Indiana -- killed at Indiana, really. And it will work in the NFL, people think. People hope. People are trying to make sure, which is why Plough fielded all those calls in the first place.

"Is he a little different? Yeah," one NFL scout says. "Is that going to be a bad thing? I don't know. The issue that you have is: Can you see him leading your team? Is he going to be the guy that says, 'You ran the wrong route,' and then, 'M-F you,' in the huddle?"

Spoiler: He will not. On the first play of the Big Ten title game against Ohio State, Nowakowski was meant to block the edge on a rollout, but he got beat and Mendoza got crushed. The man can take a beating, but even he had to leave the game for a play, and Nowakowski spiraled. He just let the soon-to-be Heisman winner get destroyed. Their whole season rides on this one guy being able to play ... and now he might not be able to play. The quarterback returned two plays later and waved off Nowakowski's repeated apologies. Mendoza was still in pain but was also still Mendoza. "Jolly," Nowakowski says. No M-Fs in sight. "He was like, 'Dude, I got cracked!'"

But here's a spoiler addendum: He doesn't need to be that kind of leader. Back in 2024, Jayden Daniels had one of the best rookie seasons of all time. The coach who oversaw all that history, Dan Quinn, says the biggest misread on what a young, highly drafted quarterback needs to be is this: "The outside thinks he has to be the leader of the team, right when he walks in the locker room. And that's not the case. Man, learn the system so well you can be counted on in clutch moments. Be a great teammate. Help others get better. But you don't have to go lead by ripping a guy for being in the wrong alignment."

If you're inauthentic, Quinn says, these guys will sniff you out. They don't want to see their young, albeit transcendent, quarterback force leadership that isn't there. They just want to see him really freaking care.

Back in early November, when the Hoosiers were already an endearing story but not yet a mythical one, they survived an unexpected battle at Penn State to stay undefeated. Mendoza had 80 yards and less than two minutes left in the game to try to escape State College with a win, and the effort started with a 7-yard sack. From there, though, it was death by gashing: a 22-yard pass, a 12-yard pass, a 29-yard pass, a 17-yard pass, and a 7-yard touchdown pass that was part brass from Mendoza (two Penn State defenders coming in hot) and part wizardry from his wide receiver (Omar Cooper Jr. toe-tapping a millimeter of grass in the back of the end zone).

After the game, Nowakowski found Mendoza sitting on the bench crying. The quarterback had just authored a game-winning, two-minute fire drill, but he couldn't stop apologizing. He was so sorry because although he led an amazing final drive, he had played only fine the rest of the game, which is why he needed an amazing final drive in the first place. Nowakowski told him to stop; he couldn't always be perfect, and he was already more perfect than most of those guys out there anyway. Pat Coogan, Indiana's center, joined in the rescue effort with some gentle ribbing: "Nando, you are so ridiculous."

Maybe so. But he really freaking cared.

IF MENDOZA WAS emotionally ruined by the thought of less-than-stellar play, it probably had something to do with this: For much of the 2025 season, he went full football whisperer. That ball did what it was told.

On a wet, miserable day last summer in Bloomington, the team was deciding whether it was dismal enough to abandon its 7-on-7. While his teammates deliberated, Mendoza warmed up with the rest of the quarterbacks. There he was, ripping 50-yard dimes with tight spirals as if the ball weren't soaking wet. Nowakowski sought out Grant Wilson, another quarterback on Indiana's roster, because he was curious.

Nowakowski: "Can you throw like that in the rain?"

Wilson: "Are you kidding me? No. Of course not."

Wretched conditions or not, Mendoza had command of the ball -- and its precise location. According to ESPN Research, he overthrew or underthrew his receiver on just 7.1% of pass attempts in 2025, the third-lowest rate in the FBS. He completed 54% of his passes on throws 20-plus yards downfield, fourth best. His receivers dropped only 2.6% of his pass attempts last year, sixth lowest among power conferences, which seems like a credit to Mendoza as much as it is to the team's sure-handed receivers, because if a ball's placement is perfect, what's left to do but not drop it? And he developed one of the best back-shoulder throws in the game, which scouts coveted for that pinpoint accuracy and for what it told them about his football acumen.

"His football IQ is so high," says Mike Giddings, owner of Proscout Inc., which has worked with 39 Super Bowl teams in its decades of scouting. "Whether it's, 'Oh, he's got him beat. Throw it out in front of him.' Or, 'Oh, he's got him covered, I'm going to back-shoulder it.' To me, that's Peyton-like."

Giddings does plenty of name-dropping. In Mendoza, he sees Philip Rivers-like preparation, Joe Montana-like game management and Andrew Luck-like facility for making the big play when needed.

Because he was, simply, clutch. Mendoza ranked first in the FBS in expected points added per dropback last year overall (+0.52), second in EPA per dropback on third and fourth downs (+0.58), and fourth in EPA per dropback when tied or trailing in the fourth quarter (+0.66).

Yes, he could do with taking fewer sacks. His arm strength is good but not great, certainly not Josh Allen-level obscene. But there just aren't that many pokable spots in his game. The NFL ruling class has spoken: He's the best quarterback in a bad quarterback class. Maybe he's not a Caleb Williams-Jayden Daniels-Trevor Lawrence god-tier prospect, but his biggest green flag as an NFL hopeful might just be his lack of red flags.

"Everything I'm hearing about the kid, he's going to come in as humble as a quarterback who didn't have the success he had," one current NFL general manager says.

He wouldn't be here, in these interview rooms with these teams, if not for that success. But ears sure do perk up when they hear a guy has that kind of outsized success and a normal-sized sense of self.

"A lot of quarterbacks come in and they think they're the man," one scout says. "And they like the fact that he's not an egomaniac."

In this one specific and vital way, Mendoza, king of quirk, is perfectly ordinary.

BEFORE HE WAS anyone's conquering hero, Mendoza was the quarterback no one wanted. Not even his own team.

In the summer of 2023, he was coming off his redshirt season at Cal and seeing about as many snaps in camp as he had the year before: practically none.

"An afterthought," says Plough, who was the team's tight ends coach at the time.

Mendoza had been an afterthought recruit too. Two stars and one lonely power conference offer, and even that, only after Cal came calling a week before signing day because it had lost a quarterback pledge. Now, he was a ghost out there. No reps, which turned into no meeting time with coaches, which turned into him being invisible. It was an exhausting hamster wheel, and Mendoza figured he'd try just about anything to hop off, so he knocked on Plough's door, looking for support. Plough had coached quarterbacks for more than a decade, but since it wasn't his day job at Cal, he told Mendoza he could help out at night.

Starting in August, Mendoza would show up to Plough's office at 9 p.m., then stay until midnight. They'd convene every night that month to mine the basics, a How to Be a Better Quarterback seminar for one. How to learn the offense; how to call plays; how to suss out defensive schemes; how to locate blitzes; how to refine throwing mechanics; how to have pocket presence. By the time the season rolled around, Plough insisted they scale back these "midnight meetings," as they took to calling them, to just Monday through Wednesday. Plough needed to take his wife out for at least one date night or she'd leave him, he said, so Mendoza "let" him have Thursdays off.

Then, about halfway through the season, the Cal coaches, looking for any juice at quarterback, tabbed Mendoza as the starter. Plough thought he might be let off the hook. He was happy for Mendoza but assumed the quarterback would trade his sessions with the tight ends coach for more time with the offensive coordinator.

Right after he was named the starter, Mendoza showed up to Plough's office at 9, like normal. "'Hey, we're still going to meet, right?'"

Their midnight sessions continued for the year, sometimes just bleeding into time together at Plough's house with his family. Plough had met his wife back in college when he was coaching in the sorority flag football league and she played on an opposing team. When this football meet-cute was brought to Mendoza's attention, he had questions. What kind of plays had Plough called? What kind of plays had his wife run? What were those plays called? And why those plays? And how those plays? And ...

"We might have talked for 90 minutes about the plays we were calling in sophomore year, in sororities," Plough says. "But that's just the way his mind works."

He can't let things go. Mendoza "rages to master," Plough says, like all the best quarterbacks the coach has come across. Mendoza can't sleep. Can't move on. Can't think about anything else. Whether it's making sure he thanks you enough for dinner, or thanks you enough for the after-hours tutoring, or wants to get at the root of why that flag football play was called 20 years ago, or wants to intimately understand why that nickel lined up 2 yards outside of the field safety last week, he won't stop, can't stop, does not stop.

"It goes from being a joke, like, 'Oh, that's just Fernando being Fernando, what a goofball,'" he says, "to like, 'Oh, no, that's actually his greatest strength.'"

It will be hard to outwork Mendoza, hard to out-effort Mendoza, Plough says. And impossible to out-Mendoza Mendoza.

BACK AT THE combine, it's the rare stretch of days when Mendoza will be outworked and out-efforted. Because he lapped the 2026 quarterbacks field, he has opted out of workouts. Instead, he'll spend his few days in town reminding anyone who will listen that nothing is set in stone, that this is a job interview, that he still must prove himself. (Nowakowski says this is Mendoza's spiel in private too. "If I asked him right now, 'Do you think you'll be the first pick?' He'll be, like, 'I don't know. Man, I hope so.'")

He won't call it a coronation, though there are plenty of people in Indiana this week willing to do the coronating for him.

Word is he received a standing ovation as he walked through St. Elmo Steak House, one of the city's (and combine's) most revered institutions, just for the act of getting dinner.

Earlier that day, Mendoza walked the length of a hallway that led to Lucas Oil Stadium, where all the workouts he did not have to do were taking place. At the end of the corridor, a police officer with a buzz cut and white beard manned the security checkpoint. He was there to keep overeager fans at bay, but as Mendoza drew closer, hands in his pocket, the officer turned zealous himself: "Theeeeeere's Fernando," he yelled. Then he pointed at the quarterback. "You're a blessing," he told him.

And Friday, after he has completed his news conference duties, Mendoza walks past a different security guard, overseeing a different checkpoint, who pulls him aside. "Mr. Mendoza, we're all so proud of you," she says, then gives him a black bracelet. A token of her appreciation, perhaps, for what Mendoza just did, for what he might do yet.

His response is like so many of his others: earnest and a touch over the top. It's impossible to out-Mendoza Mendoza.

"Oh wow, I love this," he tells her. "Thank you. I love it. God bless you."

He walks away, then turns back one more time for good measure. "Thank you!"