DanKD wrote: Sat Oct 11, 2025 3:45 pm
I like Mendoza. Seems quick to process and accurate. And has some mobility and great size.
Interesting article on Mendoza in the Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/sports/football/fer ... _permalink
The Finance Nerd Who Might Be College Football’s Next Great Quarterback
Fernando Mendoza is a business school grad who spends his summers interning at investing firms and maintains an active LinkedIn profile. He’s also a leading contender for the Heisman Trophy.
Fernando Mendoza is like most college seniors studying business. He spends his summers interning. He dabbles in investing. He reads motivational books like “Extreme Ownership” and “Inner Excellence.” His only active social-media account is on LinkedIn.
But there’s one thing that makes Mendoza different: He’s also the starting quarterback for Indiana University, where he has emerged as a legitimate Heisman Trophy contender and likely a first-round NFL draft pick next spring.
In a sport where every quarterback is expected to be the CEO of his offense, Mendoza is the rare signal-caller who dreamed of a career in the corner office. He graduated from Cal’s Haas School of Business and commuted to internships in commercial real estate between two-a-days during training camp.
“It’s super unusual to be able to maintain the academics and perform on the field,” said Stephen Etter, a finance lecturer at Haas who taught the quarterback. “Fernando was extraordinary.”
Now at Indiana, Mendoza has blossomed into the most efficient passer in major college football. This season, he has completed 73% of his passes, throwing for 1,208 yards and 16 touchdowns against one pick. He’s a big reason why the Hoosiers are ranked No. 7 ahead of this weekend’s matchup against No. 3 Oregon.
But his path to the top couldn’t have been more different than his peers. An under-the-radar prospect from Miami, Mendoza was such a bookworm in high school that some coaches stopped pursuing him because they questioned whether he really wanted to play football.
So before his senior season, he settled for his safety school: Yale.
“My football career might not go the way I want,” Mendoza said, “but I still have a little sliver thinking I’ll be the next Ryan Fitzpatrick.”
Mendoza was admitted early and might have played in the Ivy League if one of Cal’s quarterback commits hadn’t flipped to UCLA at the last minute. Bill Musgrave, then the Golden Bears’ offensive coordinator, had heard about Mendoza through the coaching grapevine. He paid him a visit and offered him on the spot.
“It was kind of a no-brainer,” Mendoza said of opting for Cal over Yale. “I can get my school paid for—and Berkeley has better football.”
Mendoza arrived at the very bottom of Cal’s depth chart. As a redshirt freshman on the scout team, he chased straight A’s in the classroom and applied early to Haas, which admits only about a dozen athletes in any given year.
He was ecstatic when he got in, and quickly realized that his accomplishments on the gridiron paled in comparison to some of his new classmates. “A person in my group project had their own TED Talk,” he said.
Mendoza interned at Acre Investment Company, a real-estate investment firm in Pleasanton, Calif., the summer before his sophomore year. He’d wake up at 5:30 a.m. to head to Cal’s football facility for practice until about 10:30 a.m., then head to Acre’s offices to crunch numbers.
“We’d literally scramble with a shower, put on our business casual with our dress shirts on, belt, tie, dress shoes,” Mendoza said.
When the work day was over, he’d hurry back to campus for a cold plunge, footwork reps and hours of film review. He stayed organized with a whiteboard, where he wrote down daily to-do lists, with action items like “send some handwritten letters to people who have given you internships” or “do yoga for 15 minutes,” balancing his long-term career and football goals.
“He sent me a picture of the whiteboard once,” said Tim Plough, who coached Mendoza at Cal. “It looked like Russell Crowe in ‘A Beautiful Mind’.”
Even a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician might have struggled to decipher the whiteboard during a hectic sophomore year that saw Mendoza become starting quarterback for the Golden Bears in October, then begin an internship at Newmark, another commercial real-estate firm. A breakout season followed in Berkeley.
Etter, the professor who mentored Mendoza, puts him in elite company for a student-athlete at Haas, alongside Olympic swimmer Ryan Murphy and pro golfer Collin Morikawa. “In my mind,” he said, “those are the three golden stars.”
Other football coaches thought so, too. When the transfer portal opened last December, Mendoza wanted to stay at Berkeley, not least because he already had a venture capital internship lined up. But he wound up transferring to Indiana to join his younger brother Alberto. It was a chance to get a “masters in football” alongside a masters at Indiana’s Kelley School of Business, he said.
Faced with learning a new offense for the fourth year in a row, he applied learning techniques he picked up at Haas to help him memorize the playbook. He drew up a syllabus on his whiteboard, then reviewed handwritten flashcards each morning. After practice, he quizzed his backups on who could draw up the most detailed play.
Switching schools also meant making a lot more money in endorsement deals.
“The first thing we did,” said Fernando Mendoza IV, the quarterback’s father, “was talk about tax liabilities.”
The second thing Mendoza did was pay his own tuition. Cal terminated his scholarship when he left for Indiana, so he covered the cost of the two classes he needed to graduate with his NIL earnings.
“He doesn’t spend any money on himself,” said Elsa Mendoza, his mother. “All he does is invest.”
Mendoza’s investments in his football career are already paying dividends.
“I think he’s going to be playing football for a long time,” said Plough, now the head coach at UC-Davis. “He might have to put off that business degree for a while.”