By all accounts, Fernando Mendoza is a hard worker, a very intelligent guy, and someone who is capable of taking in an entire offensive scheme and deploying it on the field at a very high level.

Those things had to be true when Mendoza was leading the Indiana Hoosiers to a 16-0 record and the national championship. It’s how Mendoza himself won the Heisman Trophy after a season in which he completed 273 of 379 passes (72.0%) for 3,535 yards (9.3 yards per attempt), 41 touchdowns, six interceptions, and a passer rating of 130.4. It’s also why the Las Vegas Raiders felt so comfortable taking him with the first overall pick in the 2026 NFL draft.

But if there was one thing everybody knew would be an adjustment for Mendoza when he got to the NFL, it was the ability to take the ball from under center, read the full field from that vantage point, and make things happen.

Not because Mendoza was incapable of such things at Indiana. But because he so rarely did it.

In 2025, per Sports Info Solutions, Mendoza threw exactly two passes from under center, and both of them were for short touchdowns. Everything else was out of the pistol or the shotgun.

Every under center dropback from Fernando Mendoza in the 2025 season.

Don’t blink, or you’ll miss them! pic.twitter.com/I8jiS5FbxS

— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) August 1, 2026

Under head coach Curt Cignetti, Mendoza also had the NCAA’s most RPO dropbacks with 103, so as well as he played, he was doing what he did in a pretty fixed ecosystem.

Which you can get away with in college. The NFL, not so much.

Now, Mendoza operates under Raiders head coach Klint Kubiak, who has always been an under center evangelist for his quarterbacks. When Kubiak was the Seattle Seahawks’ offensive coordinator last season, Sam Darnold had the NFL’s third-most dropbacks from under center (203) behind only Matthew Stafford and Caleb Williams, and Darnold was amazing out of it.

In his first season with the defending world champs, Darnold dropped back 203 times from under center, completing 123 of 186 passes for 1,900 yards, 1,099 air yards, 21 touchdowns, six interceptions, and a passer rating of 123.9. When adding play-action to those under center dropbacks, which Darnold did 138 times in Klint Kubiak’s offense, Darnold completed 89 of 128 passes for 1,524 yards, 890 air yards, 15 touchdowns, five interceptions, and a passer rating of 132.4 — the NFL’s highest among quarterbacks taking at least 100 play-action under center snaps.

Darnold is also exceptional with boot-action concepts, where he’ll fake to the running back and roll out of the pocket, giving the defense one more bit of eye candy to deal with.

When the @Seahawks combine under center snaps, playfakes, and boot action together, the resulting eye candy is just about impossible for any defense to stop consistently. pic.twitter.com/hYbtzcURJ5

— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) July 31, 2026

This is another adjustment for Mendoza to make, because he had just 50 passing attempts last season from outside the pocket, completing 24 passes for 324 yards, three touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 80.8.

Everybody knew that this was a series of tweaks that would take time.

“It’s a hard position to play, and there’s a lot to learn beyond throwing football and being a good teammate,” Raiders general manager John Spytek said in his pre-draft press conference on April 14 — back when the Raiders knew they were taking Mendoza, but it wasn’t official yet. “I mean, a lot of these guys, they live their entire lives in shotgun — they don’t huddle. So, you’ve really got to teach some of these guys how to run a huddle, and how to break a huddle, and how to get under center, and call a cadence, because you see so many of them clap now, too.

“So, it’s far beyond just learning a playbook, which in and of itself is hard enough. And I think when you can be patient, and we all understand there’s not a ton of patience in the job that we chose here, but if you can find some level of patience and put people in positions when they’re ready, that’s the best way forward. And we’ve got to remind ourselves some of that sometimes too, because we all want to see the young guys play. We want to see them play well, but we don’t want to put anybody out there, regardless of the position, who is not ready.”

The rookie was just happy to get going with it.

“Well, I watched a lot of film,” Mendoza said right after he was drafted, when asked why Kubiak’s offense would be a good fit. “I wasn’t necessarily installing this offense. I was installing a general NFL offense, getting more accustomed to under center play and general West Coast concepts, which does fit under this tree, which now paid off in taking that risk. Talking about fortune favors the bold, rolling the dice on that a little bit. But this scheme, it really allows the quarterback to be a point guard.

“I believe that my job — we have so many great playmakers, whether from the outside, tight end, running back or offensive line, I just need to get the ball to the playmakers and do my part of the offense and be my 1/11th. And at that point, I believe this offense allows the quarterback to do that with such great coaches. I look forward to immersing myself into it.”

Immersing oneself into a thing, and having that thing bite back a bit, is entirely common for young quarterbacks. And so it has been through Mendoza’s first two NFL games against the Arizona Cardinals and the Houston Texans.

Against the Cardinals on August 13, Mendoza attempted four of his 16 passes from under center, completing three for 39 yards. Not earthshaking, but not disastrous, either.

Fernando Mendoza’s four passing attempts against the Cardinals from under center.

Not bad. pic.twitter.com/vx1OphNDpw

— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) August 21, 2026

On Thursday night, against a Texans defense that was a bit more loaded for bear — not a lot of starters on the field, but this may be the NFL’s best defense overall — the Raiders tried to expand Mendoza’s under center palette, and the results were mixed. 13 of his 15 passing attempts came from under center, and he completed six of those passes for 52 yards. Well, he did complete one more pass… but it was to Texans rookie linebacker Wade Woodaz, and Woodaz returned the interception 80 yards for a touchdown.

TEXANS PICK-6 ALERT 🚨

LVvsHOU on ESPN
Stream on @NFLPlus pic.twitter.com/li2QM4hEah

— NFL (@NFL) August 21, 2026

A bit of a rough go, which everybody expected.

“I came away that there’s a lot more learning to do,” Mendoza said postgame. “Although maybe you had success at another level, this level’s a whole step further, and the margins are so small. One tiny mistake can lead to catastrophe. Want to make sure that I best serve my teammates, and get better from these experiences.”

Kubiak had the training wheels on in that none of Mendoza’s under center completions went for more than nine air yards. It was a lot of short stuff, and the pick-six came about because Mendoza expected rookie running back Mike Washington Jr. to sit in the middle of the field on his release route, and Washington drifted out instead. Which left Woodaz in the perfect spot — where Washington should have been.

In addition to the differences in navigating the pocket from under center, Mendoza was now dealing with a lot more heavy personnel against the Texans. Seven of those dropbacks had a tight end in the backfield, either Connor Heyward or Patrick Gurd, and that adds a new level of complexity and potential claustrophobia to the play. Now, Mendoza has to not only develop his dropbacks and pass sets from under center, but he also needs to know where both backs are, and he needs to operate with the understanding that there isn’t as much room as there is when you’re taking shotgun snaps and dicing up a defense from there.

Under center play-action is its own complication for fairly obvious reasons — you have to turn your head to the defense when you’re faking to the back, and by the time you whip your head around, the defensive picture you see could be entirely different. You saw the results of that imperfect storm on the pick-six. Mendoza drifted in the pocket when he was trying to read things out after he turned his head back to the defense, and… well, these things take time.

Like his father Gary, Klint Kubiak is an under center, boot-action evangelist.

It’s going to take Fernando Mendoza some time to get straight with that particular religion. pic.twitter.com/9MvFRLTUga

— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) August 21, 2026

This is hardly a professional death sentence for Mendoza. As Spytek said pre-draft, such adjustments for college quarterbacks are common, and this will be especially glaring as the NFL returns to more of an under center mindset as it has over the last three seasons. There are great NFL quarterbacks — Joe Burrow is the most prominent example — who have always preferred to live in the gun. When Gary Kubiak became the Denver Broncos’ head coach in 2015, he had to reconcile his own under center boot-action preferences with a quarterback in Peyton Manning who had also learned to live in (and love) the gun.

Given what Klint Kubiak has made it clear he wants his passing game to look like, don’t be surprised if Fernando Mendoza’s biggest NFL adjustment is finding his home with an architecture that is foreign to him at this time. If it can trip up the likes of Joe Burrow and Peyton Manning, the rookie should get a bit of grace for a while.