Kirk Herbstreit has seen Fernando Mendoza play football on a national microphone more than any other player, and he has been watched a lot.
On the Pat McAfee Show on Tuesday, the ESPN college football analyst compared the new Raiders quarterback’s learning curve to that of two Hall of Famers and teased one that Raider Nation is going to be chewing on all summer long.
“You know why you trust him? Because he’ll beat you out of his mind,” Herbstreit said. “There aren’t a lot of guys who know the game and understand the game well enough to see the pre-snap movement in the NFL, the complexities of half the defense playing this coverage and the other half playing something else.”
He then dropped a comp that would remain on sports radio for the next month.
“He may need some time. I mean, Troy Aikman, Peyton Manning, everybody needs time to adjust to the speed of the game,” Herbstreit told McAfee. “But he’s going to be a game manager. He’s going to be a distributor. And his X factor is that he moves better than I think a lot of people want to give him credit for.”
Pump the brakes if you want. Herbstreit did not say Mendoza was Manning. He said the adjustment timeline for the typical quarterback isn’t immediate. There is a difference. But the names themselves tell you where the ceiling resides in Herbstreit’s mind.
Herbstreit is not alone in his praise of Fernando Mendoza
Pat McAfee, who had covered many of Indiana’s games the past two seasons, was right there with him. And he wasn’t subtle about it.
“Each ball is a tight spiral,” McAfee said. “Yeah, we saw him make throws during TV timeouts. We saw him make throws during games; we saw him make throws on the sideline with his brother. We saw him almost take Curt Cignetti’s head off when he was warming up. Every ball is a dart, every single ball.”
This too was no different.
Mel Kiper Jr. has been playing this drum for a month. An ESPN draft analyst called Mendoza “a mix between Peyton Manning and Matt Ryan” earlier this spring and made the point that this kid’s Indiana season wasn’t created out of thin air. Mendoza was getting first-round buzz from his Cal tape in August, before he even threw a pass for the Hoosiers.
Then, Bleacher Report’s analytics team this week took a look at what the most useful framing might be for Raider Nation. The range of his results for Mendoza spans from Ryan Tannehill on the floor to Peyton Manning on the ceiling.
Tannehill won 22 games in two seasons at Tennessee and pulled the Titans to within a quarter of the Super Bowl. This worst situation is coming to light. Worst case.
Read it again.
Clint Kubiak is managing Fernando Mendoza’s expectations like a pro
Clint Kubiak has been smart about all this. He has publicly stated that he wants Mendoza to sit behind Kirk Cousins for a year and learn the offense before being thrown to the wolves. Owner Mark Davis opened the door earlier this week by calling Mendoza “potentially the starting QB,” but the soft consensus is still that Cousins gets Week 1.
None of this changes what Herbstreit, McAfee, Kipper and Bleacher Report presented over the course of a news cycle.
Children are wired differently. The arm is real. Processing speed is the one trait scouts can’t teach. And the comparisons coming from national voices, which don’t do the Raiders any favors, keep landing in the same neighborhood.
Manning. Aikman. Matt Ryan.
Raider Nation has spent more than two decades waiting for a quarterback worthy of pinning the franchise. National media told him he might finally have one.
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