On April 23rd, Roger Goodell is going to say, “With the first overall pick of the 2026 NFL draft, the Las Vegas Raiders select: Fernando Mendoza. Quarterback, Indiana University.”
After that, it’s all on the Raiders to make sure their guy has a good career, and that starts with the 2026 season. Luckily, the bar is set extremely low for quarterbacks who are picked first overall. Also luckily, the bar for Raiders quarterbacks is set extremely low ... but they have the opportunity to set it all straight.
The Mendoza line
In baseball, the Mendoza line is a .200 batting average. It’s supposed to signify whether or not a guy is good or bad at batting. When we’re talking about getting a quarterback to “succeed right off the bat,” you have to define the word “succeed” and set Mendoza’s Mendoza line.
Since the year 2000, there have been 17 quarterbacks who have been selected first overall in their drafts. In games that those quarterbacks have started, they’ve had a 62-140-2 record; that’s an average winning percentage of 30.5 percent. The bar is low.
On one end of the scale is Andrew Luck’s rookie season in 2012, when his Colts went 11-5 with him as a starter after a 2-14 season. The other end is Jared Goff’s rookie season in 2016, when his Rams went 0-7 with him as a starter after a 7-9 season (they traded for the first pick).
The Raiders earned their pick with a 3-14 record, so it’s going to be easy for them to do better than that. But, if we’re looking at that threshold of a 30.5 percent winning percentage, the Raiders will need to win at least six games (assuming Mendoza starts all 17 games).
You can argue that wins are not a quarterback stat, and you’re probably right. But we’re talking about how the Raiders, as a team, can help Fernando Mendoza. That starts with the guys in charge of everything.
Klint Kubiak's choice coaches
Fernando Mendoza is a good quarterback, but he’s a very incomplete quarterback … especially for the guy who’s going first overall. His coaching staff is going to have a lot of work to do, but the good news is that this isn’t their first rodeo.
Between Klint Kubiak (head coach), Andrew Janocko (offensive coordinator), Nick Holz (passing game coordinator), and Mike Sullivan (quarterbacks coach), these guys have coached seven rookie quarterbacks who were drafted in the first three rounds. Four of those were first-round picks, and two of those were the first overall.
It’s been a lot of mixed results. Kubiak was with the Broncos when they picked Paxton Lynch in the first round of the 2016 draft. Lynch is famous for the exact opposite of being good: he’s the first player to be benched in the NFL, CFL, USFL, and XFL … so, not great.
Mike Sullivan, on the other hand, was a huge part of Eli Manning’s success, but that success wasn’t immediate. Sullivan was the Giants’ wide receivers coach when Manning was drafted in 2004 (a bad year for Manning), but he stuck around and became their offensive coordinator in 2010 and 2011. Bad coaches don’t stick around for seven years and win two Super Bowls. He also went on to be the Steelers’ quarterbacks coach from 2021 to 2023, which means he was partially responsible for Kenny Pickett’s lack of success/growth.
As a passing game coordinator, Nick Holz might not necessarily be as close to Mendoza as Sullivan, but he’s had the most recent success developing a first-overall quarterback; last year, he was with the Titans and Cam Ward. No one watched him last season and said he wasn’t growing… despite his head coach getting fired. You watched him take some baby steps toward getting better, but he couldn’t really do anything because the skill around him was relative to a first-grade talent show.
All these guys have experience, but not all of it is good. If you’re the Raiders, you need to make sure these guys all get on the same page, turn into some kind of hive mind, and do Cam Ward-type things for Mendoza rather than the Paxton Lynch-type things.
But again, as we all saw with Cam Ward: he needs the guys around him… and they haven’t really done a whole lot of that.
Fernando's Friends and Co.
The Raiders' offensive line was a septic tank last season; they were catastrophically bad at run blocking, but they were just regular-bad at pass blocking. A big reason for that was injuries.
Kolton Miller (left tackle) went on the IR with an ankle in September, and Jackson Powers-Johnson (right guard) followed him there a few weeks later with his own ankle. On top of that, they also rotated through three different centers. It was a hot mess, but they’re trying to fix it.
So far in free agency, the Raiders have signed 17 players. Four of those guys are offensive linemen, and two of them are starting caliber: the cheap veteran left guard, Spencer Burford, and the mega-expensive demi-god center, Tyler Linderbaum.
Another player that the Raiders signed in free agency was wide receiver Jailen Nailor. He’s coming off the best season of his four-year career, where he had 29 catches for 444 yards and four touchdowns. If that sounds not great, that’s because it isn’t… but they’re still paying him almost $12 million per year.
The idea behind it has to be that he spent those last four seasons on an offense with Justin Jefferson, and that if he’s not splitting targets with an elite elite receiver, he can be a capable WR1. Why do they think that? Your guess is as good as mine; he was a sixth-round pick.
All this means is the Raiders have a theoretically good offensive line that they spent beaucoup dollars on, an unbelievably talented running back with Ashton Jeanty, one of the best tight ends in the world with Brock Bowers… And a receiving corps of Nailor, Tre Tucker, and Jack Bech.
Will a healthy and new offensive line be enough to keep Mendoza clean? They had better hope so. Will a dominant pass-catching tight end and a very lackluster group of receivers be enough for Mendoza to be productive? Maybe, but probably not.
Luckily, there’s still a whole lot of offseason left, and the draft is coming up in a little less than a month. That’s going to have to be where they’ll do the rest of their damage.
Where and how do the Raiders grow?
After the Raiders pick Mendoza, they’re going to have nine more draft picks. They have a second, a third, three fourths, a fifth, two sixths, and a seventh round pick. That’s a pretty good spot to be in … You know, it’d be a whole lot better if they had the Ravens’ first round pick (14th overall) too, but them's the breaks.
When they make their second pick at 36, they’ll be able to get another very solid wide receiver prospect or a very solid left guard prospect.
Wide receivers who could be available are Omar Cooper Jr., KC Concepcion, Chris Bell, or Denzel Boston. Cooper would be especially interesting because he was Mendoza’s WR1 at Indiana last year. He’s not Ja’Marr Chase, and Mendoza isn’t Joe Burrow… but the last time we saw a quarterback get drafted first overall, and then his best receiver go to the same team, it worked out pretty well.
Linemen who could be available are Keylan Rutledge, Chase Biontis, or Connor Lew. All of those guys are good options, but Rutledge can give them depth at multiple positions. For an offensive line that was plagued by guys missing time last season, that should be something that weighs very heavily on their choice of a second-round pick.
However, all of this could be completely moot. If the Raiders are totally into Mendoza’s long-term success, the other thing they could do is sign Kirk Cousins and play him for the entire season. Let Mendoza ride the bench, grow, and learn everything from one of the most veteran quarterbacks on the free agent market right now, and then become the starter in 2027. That’s the best move… It would’ve been a whole lot better if they had the Ravens’ 2027 first-round pick too, but them’s the breaks.