Fernando Mendoza and the Raiders' sit-and-learn plan: Is he ready to start?
The day you find out you're going to be a parent is one of the scariest days of your life. It comes with all the worries, from the mundane and practical (What if I drop him?) to the broad and existential (What if I mess him up?). All of it comes under the terrifying umbrella of "What if I'm not ready?"
The fact is you're probably not, and you probably never will be.
This thought popped into my head Tuesday, when the Raiders' deadline-day trade of Kirk Cousins to the Vikings suddenly elevated rookie Fernando Mendozainto the role of starting quarterback -- sooner than the team had planned. Is he ready? Maybe not, but that's not the relevant question anymore. It's happening, and all the Raiders can do is try their best to not mess this up.
"It shouldn't be a whirlwind if he's been preparing the right way each week," Raiders coach Klint Kubiak said Thursday. "At some point, he knew he was going to get an opportunity, and so he's been preparing that way since April."
Sure, sounds great. Mendoza was the first pick in the 2026 draft as a Heisman Trophy winner and national champion. He's comfortable in the spotlight and has a history of exceeding expectations. He might be absolutely fine from the jump. He might have been fine if the Raiders had never signed Cousins and they had started him in Week 1, the way the Titans did with Cam Ward last season, the Bears did with Caleb Williams the year before that, the Panthers did with Bryce Young the year before that, and so on. All of those guys had plenty of hiccups at the start -- there aren't a lot of Joe Burrows or Andrew Lucks out there who get picked No. 1 and hit right away-- but there's also no real evidence that starting right away is the reason Young and Ward are still struggling, or that Williams is lighting up the league in Year 3.
The Raiders were extremely intentional about this. Once they knew they had the first pick and were taking Mendoza there, they made an intricate plan.
First, they hired an offensive-minded head coach who had just won the Super Bowl as Sam Darnold's offensive coordinator and has a history of scheming things up to put quarterbacks of varying ability levels in positions to succeed. They told anyone who'd listen that they absolutely did not want to play Mendoza right away. Raiders minority owner Tom Brady has been vocal about his belief that rookie quarterbacks need more time to develop than the NFL tends to give them, and Brady's voice carries a great deal of weight in that building right now. The Raiders have said since the offseason that they wanted to make sure not only that Mendoza was ready, but also that they were ready for him. In other words, they wanted to give the roster enough time to develop so they didn't have to ask him to carry it once the time came.
To that end, Las Vegas signed Cousins in free agency and made it clear at every step that he was going to be the starter. The Raiders built out an offensive coaching staff designed to give Mendoza whatever he needed. Kubiak was the game-plan guru and overall organizational tone-setter. And former Seattle assistant Andrew Janocko, who has now worked on the same staff as Kubiak for five of the past seven years, was hired as the coordinator.
Longtime NFL coach Mike Sullivan was brought on as quarterbacks coach, a role in which he has been assigned as direct overseer of Mendoza's development. Sources with knowledge of the situation say Sullivan's involvement with Cousins and the day-to-day prep work for the games has been minimal compared to his direct coaching of Mendoza. He was hired to get the first overall pick ready.
Sullivan has seen this before. He was on the Giants' coaching staff in 2004, when New York landed Eli Manning and had him sit behind veteran Kurt Warner for the first nine games of his first season before having the rookie start the final seven contests. This situation is eerily similar to that one. Those Giants were 5-4 when they switched from Warner to Manning. These Raiders are 4-5.
I remember asking Manning years ago about his philosophy on rookie quarterbacks sitting or playing right away. He told me he felt he'd had the best of both worlds -- the chance to sit and learn from Warner while getting his feet wet as a professional, along with the chance to start a meaningful number of games as a rookie so his head wasn't spinning when he opened the 2005 season as the starter. (David Carr was Manning's backup at the time of this conversation, and he told me he wished he'd had the chance to sit behind a veteran himself, instead of starting right away as a rookie in Houston in 2002.)
Mendoza is already feeling what Manning felt. At his news conference Wednesday, he expressed heartfelt gratitude for Cousins, whom he said "had me with open arms and has taught me so many things, whether it's film study, how to operate as a starting quarterback, all the different multifaceted approaches that have made him so successful, he has shared with no restrictions or constraints."
The Raiders' hope was for that to continue. As recently as last weekend, there were people in that organization who wanted to stick to the plan -- to keep Cousins past the trade deadline and hold off on playing Mendoza a few more weeks, maybe even until after their Week 13 bye. The Vikings called the Raiders about Cousins prior to last weekend, but it wasn't until after Sunday that they felt there was a chance Vegas would trade him.
Tuesday's trade deadline -- and a disastrous performance by Carson Wentz for the Vikings on Monday night -- sped up both teams' timetables. If the deadline were two weeks from now, it's entirely possible the Vikings wouldn't have offered a third-round pick for Cousins quite yet, or that the Raiders wouldn't have listened anyway. But life doesn't wait to see how your plans are going. Sometimes, it forces you to do something before you're sure you're ready to do it.
What the Raiders did here is rare. From 2006 to 2025, there were 41 quarterbacks selected in the top 10 overall. Of those 41, only six did not start at least one of their teams' first eight games in their respective rookie seasons, per ESPN Research. And only two of those six -- JaMarcus Russell and Jared Goff -- were picked first overall. The others were Jake Locker, Patrick Mahomes, Michael Penix Jr. and J.J. McCarthy. That's a pretty wide range of outcomes, and it shows why there's no set playbook for how to do this.
The ideal path is the 2017 Chiefs, who draftedMahomes to sit behind Alex Smith, started 5-0, stayed in first place all season and only started Mahomes in the final regular-season game because they had their playoff seed locked up. No one else has really been able to pull that off. (Yes,Jordan Love was a first-rounder who got to sit for three years, but that was becauseAaron Rodgers was still in Green Bay winning MVP awards.)
In 2024, the Patriots tried to sit Drake Maye behind an ineffective Jacoby Brissett, then started Maye in Week 6 only to find out he had been ready all along. That same year, the Commanders started Jayden Daniels right away and ended up in the NFC Championship Game, the Broncos startedBo Nixright away and made the playoffs, the Falcons keptPenix on the bench (behind Cousins) for 14 games and still aren't sure what they have there, and the Vikings didn't playMcCarthy because he got hurt in August. In 2023, the Texans started C.J. Stroud right away, and he won Rookie of the Year. The Colts started Anthony Richardson Sr. right away that same year to disastrous results whose effects the organization still feels three years later.
Justin Herbert had to start the second game of his 2020 rookie season on a couple of minutes' notice after a team doctor injuredTyrod Taylorwhile giving him a pregame injection. Jaxson Dart had to go in earlier than planned for the Giants last season because Russell Wilson was terrible and then-coach Brian Daboll had (justified, as it turns out) concerns about his job security.
Teams don't want to throw the rookie in there until they are sure he can handle everything that comes with it. Again, that 2017 Chiefs situation is the perfect setup. Vikings coach Kevin O'Connell once told me the concern with the young QB is "compounding negativity" -- that bad things are going to happen, and you want to make sure your player has enough confidence and preparation to not let them pile up and affect him negatively.
There is no science to this, no hard-and-fast rules and no checklist that lets us know when it's time. As a result, this isn't likely to be perfect. No matter how good the Raiders feel about the way they've set up Mendoza to hit the ground running, there are going to be things he hasn't seen and isn't prepared to manage. The Raiders still don't know how he'll handle touch throws under game conditions or how he'll deal with pressure in his face.
They threw him in there for a series at the end of a Week 5 game in Foxborough, when the Patriots were blowing them out. But that's a much different situation than staring down the defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks' defense from the first snap, trying to diagnose where the pressure is coming from and making snap decisions with the game on the line. Mendoza will be the fifth quarterback to make his first career start against a Mike Macdonald defense; the previous four went 0-4 with no touchdown passes and a combined nine interceptions.
Mendoza said Wednesday that the Raiders "have done a fantastic job in aiding my development, and I can't thank them enough, and now it's my turn to do my one-eleventh." Kubiak said there wasn't any particular moment in practice that made him feel Mendoza was ready, "and that's a good thing. It's consistency, playmaking, knowledge of our scheme. Just his daily preparation has been up to standard, and now he's got to go prove it in the game."
It's a leap of faith, as it is for every team and every young quarterback who find themselves in this situation. The Raiders do not and cannot know how this is going to go. They've done what they believe is the best they could to give Mendoza the tools he needs to succeed, not knowing if they'd be able to give him the time. As so often happens, that last part wasn't up to them.
The hope now is that the whole setup -- Cousins, the coaching staff, a more developed offensive line, a couple of star tight ends and a few critical months in an apprentice role -- puts him in a position to thrive. The Raiders will second-guess themselves and wonder, possibly even for years to come, whether the moves and decisions they made here were the right ones. Odds are they aren't ready yet and neither is he, but that doesn't matter, because it's time. There comes a point where you just have to take off the training wheels and hope everything you did up until then was enough. And if you wait until you're 100% sure ... well, then you'll never get there.br/]
