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It was the week before the draft, and with almost a full year’s work of scouting invested, it was time for GM John Spytek and his personnel staff to give Raiders ownership a look. On the screen was what they call the “135 Board,” a vertical stack of the draft’s best players.
Controlling owner Mark Davis looked at it and smiled.
“I see the quarterback’s up there,” he said.
“Yep,” Spytek responded, “and he’s going to stay there.”
As big reveals in sports go, this wasn’t exactly LeBron James telling Jim Gray he was leaving Cleveland for Miami. And that was for a good reason. No one really needed to tell Davis—or anyone else—that the Heisman Trophy winner and national champion from Indiana, Fernando Mendoza, was going to be the first pick in the draft.
The owner knew it. Spytek knew it. And the football-watching faction of America wasn’t in the dark on it, either.
But there was significance to the moment for those in the room in the closure it gave everyone. Over the past seven months, those with Davis and Spytek in front of that big screen flew commercial and private, rented cars in the South and the Midwest, stayed in big cities and small towns and poured endless hours into studying the 2026 draft’s quarterbacks.
It started well before it became a fait accompli that Mendoza would go No. 1, and extended past when those outside the building saw the pick as a foregone conclusion.
Of course, Spytek and his top lieutenants had a pretty good idea for a long while that the Hoosiers’ star would be holding up a No. 15 jersey in Las Vegas in late April. But this was never going to be a coronation. Every step would be taken. Every box would be checked.
A week later, Spytek sat in that same war room as the commissioner announced the Raiders were on the clock. The 45-year-old second-year GM found himself totally at ease.
“I just remember being in there with a great group of people that worked their tails off all year to find the right guy,” Spytek said in the aftermath. “It was very peaceful. We were very thorough. We were confident that we’d done the work the right way to be so calm in such a massive moment for our organization’s future. So it wasn’t stressful or suspenseful. It was just calm.
“And so we’re on the clock, we were like, ‘Call up Fernando. He’s the guy.’”
The search is on
The official kickoff to the Raiders’ search for their next quarterback probably happened on the third weekend of last September, with Spytek and assistant GM Brian Stark traveling to check out the Auburn-Oklahoma game before heading to D.C. for Las Vegas’s game against the Commanders. The Sooners’ transfer quarterback, John Mateer, was off to a hot start and had entered the quarterbacking equation for 2026.
By then, as part of his normal process, Stark had already broken down Mendoza’s film from his two years as Cal’s starter and written a report on Mendoza the previous spring, as he did all the other quarterback prospects, not knowing what was to come.
“I thought he had a chance to be a really good prospect,” said Stark, recalling his pre-IU assessment of the first pick. “I really did. But I did feel like he was still growing and maturing. I thought he could get stronger. And I thought more offensive exposure would be good. I was kind of waiting to see where the next part of his game was; it was a little bit more of a spread system [at Cal], a little bit more horizontal spread stuff.”
At that point, Mendoza was on a longer list of prospects the Raiders wanted to get eyes on over the course of the 2025 season in live settings, as they did Mateer in Oklahoma’s 24–17 win over Auburn on Sept. 20. (The QB bulled over a Tigers defender to score the game-winning touchdown that afternoon, for what it’s worth.)
“I thought he had a chance to be a really good prospect. I really did. But I did feel like he was still growing and maturing. I thought he could get stronger. And I thought more offensive exposure would be good.”Raiders assistant GM Brian Stark
Scouts wanting to see coveted prospects in person is relatively standard, and the Raiders’ brass’s view of the top-end guys in that sort of environment wasn’t limited to the quarterbacks. Along those lines, Spytek and Stark were also on hand for BYU-Utah on Oct. 18 to get a live look at Utes first-round tackles Spencer Fano and Caleb Lomu, the same weekend the Raiders played the Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium, not knowing at that point where their pick would be in the draft order.
Naturally, most scouts see it as even more important to see a quarterback with their own eyes for a wide variety of reasons.
“I get there early,” Stark said. “I want to watch everything because I think you can tell a lot about their demeanor and their mindset by watching everything from warmups all the way through, how they start to interact with their teammates pregame. And then, they have their team warmups. And then as the game goes on, you can just see them on the sideline.
“When you’re watching on film or you’re watching on TV, you don’t get to see how they’re reacting to different things, you don’t get to see how they react and respond to adversity.”
That became a factor in Stark’s first live exposure to Mendoza the weekend before the trip to Utah. It was Oct. 11 in Eugene, Ore., and he and Raiders senior personnel exec Anthony Patch were there to look at both quarterbacks—with Ducks star Dante Moore on the radar, too. In the fourth quarter that afternoon, with the Hoosiers leading 20–13, Oregon freshman cornerback Brandon Finney Jr. undercut an Indiana receiver’s route, picked off Mendoza, and returned the interception for a touchdown.
That tied the game. Autzen Stadium was rocking. Stark trained his binoculars on the IU sideline.
“I could see [Mendoza] come off the field and he took a second, then you could see him go search out his coach and talk through it—he wanted feedback,” Stark said. “You could see he was talking about what he saw. I mean, I didn’t hear the conversation, obviously, but I could see them interacting.”
Stark scribbled some notes down.
Mendoza calmly returned to the field for the next possession and drove the Hoosiers 75 yards in 12 plays, capping the march by perfectly placing a back-shoulder throw from the far hash on Elijah Sarratt for the go-ahead touchdown.
‘He’s a big dude’
By Thanksgiving week, the draft’s quarterback landscape was gaining clarity just as a struggling Raiders team was falling squarely in the mix to pick first.
So Spytek, Stark and assistant director of college scouting Johnathon Stigall took the days ahead of that weekend’s game in Los Angeles (against the Chargers) to look more closely at guys they figured would be in their mix at the top of the draft. On Black Friday, they saw Mendoza play in his regular-season finale against Purdue, before heading to Fort Worth to see Cincinnati’s Brendan Sorsby and TCU’s Josh Hoover face off on Saturday.
It’d be Spytek’s first shot to see Mendoza in person.
“Just being on the field with them pregame, you get to feel and see their size,” Spytek said. “That was the first time I stood next to Fernando. You’re like, He’s a big dude. Then, to see the ball come out of his hand, see the velocity. But one thing that was cool about Fernando was when he came out to warm up, he had a very specific routine. He wasn’t out there to screw around; headphones on and playing long toss. I mean, he was working.
“And all the other quarterbacks with him—his brother and the other guys—
were working, too. It was much more like I watched Tom [Brady] and Peyton [Manning] warm up for years. They weren’t out there playing pat-and-go, playing grab-ass. They’re out there for a reason.”
The other thing that was quickly obvious to Spytek and Stark that day: It was cold. Cold enough that, in the press box, after the game started, an announcement was made that it was the coldest game in Purdue history. With that adversity came an opportunity to see a quarterback, who grew up in Florida and played his first three college seasons in California, in an uncomfortable environment.
The first quarter might’ve been Mendoza’s worst quarter of the season. Indiana had two three-and-outs on three drives. And while the other possession resulted in a touchdown, it was set up by a wayward Purdue punt that gave the Hoosiers a short field.
“It’s funny. We asked him about it later—I said, ‘Tell me about the Purdue game.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I wore way too many clothes. I just wasn’t comfortable,’” Spytek said. “But he had never played in a real cold game before, so he kind of learned something from that. He started slow. He missed some easy throws, but just kept working like he does.”
On the first possession of the second quarter, Mendoza drove the team 65 yards in 11 plays, covering seven yards on a touchdown run to finish it, which made Spytek say, “Oh, he’s athletic; when he gets running, he’s hard to catch.”
The Hoosiers won, 56–3.
The next week, the Raiders’ brass watched on TV as Mendoza delivered another big moment: a 33-yard go ball to Charlie Becker that was the dagger in finishing off a 13–10 win over top-ranked Ohio State in the Big Ten championship. It had become obvious the Raiders had to ramp up their work on Mendoza.
By the end, they had 11 live game exposures. Spytek and Stark were at the Ducks-Hoosiers rematch in the national semifinal at the Peach Bowl and the CFP title game against Miami, giving the GM three exposures and Stark four to Mendoza. Stigall, Patch, SVP of football operations Mark Thewes, and director of college scouting Brandon Yeargan had all seen him play in person once. And Midlands area scout Matt Hand had also been to three IU practices.
There was plenty of agreement on what they’d all seen.
‘This might be the guy’
The last of those exposures came at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami as the Hoosiers achieved what once seemed impossible, winning the school’s first national championship in football.
Raiders limited partner Tom Brady made the drive over from his Miami residence for that one, joining Davis, Spytek, Stark and Thewes. After Brady—who played with Spytek for a year at Michigan and worked with him in Tampa from 2020 to ’22—got the same look scouts had at Mendoza from field level for warmups, the crew retreated to a suite for the game.
With each play Mendoza made, Stark recalls turning to Brady, who was behind him and to the left, and trading a look that simply said, “Yeah, this might be the guy.” Spytek remembers locking eyes with the seven-time Super Bowl champion after Mendoza’s iconic fourth-down touchdown run to seal the win.
“It’s almost something that’s not said,” Spytek said. “It’s just like, ‘Yeah, that’s what it looks like.”
Five days earlier, Moore had announced he was returning to Oregon, eschewing the chance to jockey with Mendoza for draft position, further clarifying the picture. “It was becoming more obvious that this is the guy,” Spytek said. “But we still had a lot of work to do.”
The coaching search came next, then a scramble to get to the NFL combine.
By then, Stark and his scouts had seen all the tape, and Spytek was just about there on the Indiana film, with the Penn State game sticking out.
“When you watch the all-22 film, it’s so loud, the camera’s bouncing. And he gets zeroed [blitzed] three times in a row and knows they don’t have an answer for it because they gotta get guys out [into the route], and he takes those shots and delivers a perfect ball to win it. And it was a great play by [Omar] Cooper, too.”
Yet, they hadn’t gotten the chance to actually sit down and talk to Mendoza.
They’d get 18 minutes with him in Indianapolis.
In the first few minutes, Spytek and new coach Klint Kubiak wanted to get to know him a bit, confirm he was who their scouting work said he was and put him at ease. Then Kubiak and offensive coordinator Andrew Janocko got on the whiteboard and installed a play.
“It was very detailed, with the formation and splits of the receivers, all the different alignment details and all the different route details,” Stark said. “There are five different routes on the play, and they’re all at different depths. And then all the way through the protection. And then the quarterback’s progression versus different coverages.”
“If it’s a single-high safety, you start here,” Janocko told Mendoza. “If it’s a two-safety shell, it starts here. If it’s a pressure look, this is your answer.”
Then the coaches wiped the board clean and turned to a selection of plays they had picked from different games. Mendoza quickly identified each of them solely based on the offensive formation, the opponent and the defensive structure. “This guy,” Spytek said, “you didn’t even have to push play, and he knew it.”
After that, they asked him to return to the whiteboard to draw up and explain the play that the coaches had given him 10 minutes earlier.
“Fernando got right back up there and reinstalled the play to us,” said Stark, “like he’s been taught that play 15 times. It was very impressive.” Spytek added, “Outstanding is probably an understatement for how smart he is and his level of recall and detail.”
With that, they moved to the next step—getting to know Mendoza the person a little better.
‘That’s how you’re supposed to act’
The background work had come back clean. The Raiders had scouts with connections to Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, Mendoza’s alma mater, that they mined for information. Through the work of a variety of folks, Vegas tried to get to everyone at Cal who interacted with him. Same with Indiana. They asked the standard questions of his ex-teammates at the combine: If you could bring one teammate with you to the NFL, who would it be? Who’s the best player you ever played with? Who was the best leader you’ve played with?
Mendoza’s name came back—a lot.
But there’s a difference between hearing it and knowing it, and the Raiders knew they’d take significant steps in going from the former to the latter at Mendoza’s April 1 pro day.
The Raiders sent the cavalry. Stark, Yeargan, Janocko, VP of player personnel Brandon Hunt and offensive assistant Tim Zetts boarded a private jet in Las Vegas on March 31 that flew to Phoenix to pick up Spytek and Kubiak from the NFL owners’ meetings, then to Bloomington for the pro day. The group had a quick dinner after landing and prepared for a busy Wednesday on Indiana’s campus.
That Wednesday started with Mendoza’s workout. There, the Raiders’ officials saw his size, movement and athleticism one more time. But there was something else that stuck out—there wasn’t a quarterbacks coach running the workout. Mendoza did that himself.
“Before every throw, he would stand up and say, O.K., Omar Cooper, slant route on the left,” Stark said. “He was announcing whatever the play was, just so that there was no confusion on who was up, what route they were running. He ran the whole thing. It was very, very impressive. Really was. He took command.”
The confidence in a pressurized environment reappeared. So did his presence.
More than just that, Mendoza remembered everyone.
“After the first time we met at the combine, I saw him at the pro day, and I mean, I hadn’t seen him in a month or so,” Stark said, “He’s like, Oh, hello, Mr. Stark, good to see you again.”
After the workout wrapped, the Raiders and Mendoza retreated to a classroom the Indiana staff had set aside for them. Kubiak and Janocko installed more plays. Mendoza showed, while teaching the plays back to the room, that what they saw in Indy was no fluke.
Spytek kept his eyes on Mendoza the whole time as the coaches were giving instructions, and he saw a quarterback in his element, all in and completely engaged in the conversation.
Then, to wrap it up, Stark recalled, “Coach Kubiak just kind of started quizzing him on a bunch of things that they had talked about, trying to make it difficult. And it was difficult, and Fernando just buzzed right through it, didn’t bat an eye.”
The meeting lasted nearly two hours, and thereafter, the group went to dinner. The Raiders asked Mendoza to arrange it, asking him to pick his favorite place in Bloomington. He chose the Uptown Café. Over a steak, Mendoza started asking the Raiders’ coaches and personnel guys about their backgrounds and families, growing more at ease as the early-evening meal wore on.
As they left, Spytek said to Thewes, “Man, I wish I could’ve acted like that in front of a GM and a head coach, an offensive coordinator [and] an assistant GM when I was 22.”
“Knowing the gravity of what that dinner could be—if you have a crappy dinner, you might be like, Oh, I don’t know about this, this isn’t as clear as it used to be,” Spytek said. “But, instead, you walk out, and you’re like, ‘That’s what it is supposed to look like. That’s how you’re supposed to act. That’s how you’re supposed to have a conversation.’”
‘The kid is killing it’
Looking back now, as the 30 visit approached, Spytek can concede he already knew that Mendoza would be the first pick.
“When we walked out of that restaurant, the aggregate of the way he threw the ball and how big he was and the way he moved around and how he showed up for his teammates and how he led the pro day, and then the classroom after that for an hour and a half or two hours or whatever it was, and his intelligence and his focus in there,” Spytek said, “And then you go to dinner and you see a different side of him, which is a little more laid-back but super relatable and engaging.
“We were still gonna go through the final parts of our process, but he was gonna probably have to screw it up pretty good at that point. I mean, like, at that point, what’s he gonna do?”
Of course, Spytek was projecting a bit on how he figured Mendoza would relate to people from the very top to the very bottom of the Raiders, which would be important during his visit to Vegas.
Mendoza arrived in town late on April 6, with a full day planned for April 7.
Player personnel assistant Patrick Parrilli, a former college quarterback himself, picked up Mendoza at the hotel and led him around, following the itinerary, through the course of a tightly packed day. He spent time with the team’s health and wellness group, the trainers, the strength coaches, player-engagement staff and the guys in the equipment room. He also sat down with members of the ownership group, and had significant time with Brady, where it was just the two of them and Spytek in the room.
And for dinner, they went to The Summit Club, a Discovery Land property built by one of those owners (and Discovery Land founder and chairman), Michael Meldman. The group decamped to a private room with a crew that included Davis, Spytek, Stark, Janocko, Sullivan, Thewes and Meldman himself.
As the staff brought out different courses as part of the prix fixe meal at Geno’s, TSC’s upscale, on-property restaurant, Davis gravitated toward Mendoza, who engaged his future boss about how the owner got the team from Oakland to Vegas. They talked about Raiders history, too, with Mendoza showing fluency in a language Davis considers his own.
Spytek recalls observing it and thinking, “The kid is killing it.”
And it wasn’t just how Mendoza was doing in that moment. It was, over the day, how the entire building was seeing a guy who was a few weeks away from becoming the No. 1 pick.
He showed an interest in everyone’s jobs. He proved to be process-oriented, wanting to know how every department fit into the next. He engaged, asked questions and started building bonds.
“I think as a whole, the building was very impressed,” Stark said. “I mean, there wasn’t anyone who said anything, but, Wow, this guy’s fantastic. I’d love to work with him. That was kind of the unanimous reply.”
Spytek, in the middle of all of it, circled back with Parrilli to see how Mendoza’s personal caddy for the day was doing.
“It’s unbelievable,” Parrilli said. “I’m having the best day ever.”
“Treating everybody the right way, interacting, off his phone, he was just present all day,” Spytek said. “And I think the thing that you like about Fernando is that he understands what the assignment is. Which is to impress, but he’s just being himself. So it’s not hard for him.”
‘This guy’s a machine’
Back in February, during pre-combine meetings, the Raiders’ scouts went through what they regard as an important piece of the process—where the area scout will read his report on a prospect, then national scouts Lenny McGill and Andy Dengler will follow with theirs, and have that followed by any others who’d had exposure to the prospect. They try to treat everyone on their board the same. It’s basically a baseline for where the team is on a player.
The remarkable thing, with Mendoza, is that from that point forward, just about every box was checked. From the combine to an initial hour-long, get-to-know-you Zoom with Janocko; to the pro day; to a second, more football-centric Zoom; to the 30 visit, everything was mind-numbingly consistent. Just as people who knew him told the Raiders it would be.
“The thing that comes back from all these people that work with him is like, ‘Man, this guy’s a machine,’” Spytek said. “When it’s time to work on ball, time to study ball, time to get on the field and throw, he’s a machine.”
The results at Indiana spoke for themselves.
But after seeing it for themselves, the Raiders could speak to it, as well.
So in the final meeting where Mendoza was discussed as a prospect, there was a matter-of-factness to the conversation that indicated what seemed like a slam dunk to the general public as far back as January had become an actual slam dunk for the team making the pick.
“It was just, ‘Hey, any new information? Any concerns come up, anything like that?’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, nothing’s come up,’” Stark said. “We do that periodically; we’re going through the board, and there are just a few of us in there—Is there any new information on Fernando? No, it’s still great. And it was like, O.K., we’re good.”
That’s why, just like Spytek, Stark sat at ease in the war room in the late afternoon hours of April 23—alongside Davis, Meldman, limited partner/likely Davis successor Egon Durban and team president Sandra Douglass Morgan. And it wasn’t just that he’d known what the team was going to do for some time.
“It was exciting for a lot of reasons—a lot of change, a long season, long offseason, coaching search, all the work we’d done on Fernando and the whole draft class. I was excited. Never really want to be in this position again, holding the first overall pick, but very comfortable, very confident [that] it’s a great opportunity for us.”Stark
More than that, it was based on who they were set to bring in.
“It was exciting for a lot of reasons—a lot of change, a long season, long offseason, coaching search, all the work we’d done on Fernando and the whole draft class,” Stark said. “I was excited. Never really want to be in this position again, holding the first overall pick, but very comfortable, very confident [that] it’s a great opportunity for us. If we have to be in this position, we all felt really good about there being a player like Fernando to be able to take No. 1.”
And, sure, that was the assumed conclusion from the start.
But to get to it, it took a lot of time, a lot of people and a lot of steps.
Which, in turn, is why the Raiders, all these months later, feel so good about it.
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ALBERT BREER
Albert Breer is a senior writer covering the NFL for Sports Illustrated, delivering the biggest stories and breaking news from across the league. He has been on the NFL beat since 2005 and joined SI in 2016. Breer began his career covering the New England Patriots for the MetroWest Daily News and the Boston Herald from 2005 to ’07, then covered the Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News from 2007 to ’08. He worked for The Sporting News from 2008 to ’09 before returning to Massachusetts as The Boston Globe’s national NFL writer in 2009. From 2010 to 2016, Breer served as a national reporter for NFL Network. In addition to his work at Sports Illustrated, Breer regularly appears on NBC Sports Boston, 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston, FS1 with Colin Cowherd, The Rich Eisen Show and The Dan Patrick Show. A 2002 graduate of Ohio State, Breer lives near Boston with his wife, a cardiac ICU nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital, and their three children.
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