FOX Sports’ Joel Klatt: Why Raiders Fans Should Be Excited about Fernando Mendoza

The case for Las Vegas Raiders fans to be excited about Fernando Mendoza was made on The Rich Eisen Show by FOX Sports analyst Joel Klatt, who had a front-row seat to the quarterback's signature college moment and walked through the play-by-play of why he believes the rookie is built for the NFL.

The centerpiece was Indiana's road win at Penn State and the Omar Cooper touchdown that has been replayed all spring. Klatt set the scene around an Indiana team that, by his own admission, was not at its best that day. Penn State had fired James Franklin, was playing under an interim head coach, and treated the game as a season-defining stand.

"They had not played well that day. It was one of their worst performances. They didn't run the football very well," Klatt said. Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti, Klatt added, predicted exactly that environment in their pregame conversation. "He was like, Joel, this will be our toughest game. It's going to be a dog fight till the very end."

What sold Klatt on Mendoza was not the touchdown. It was the down before the drive started. Backed up inside their own 20, second and 16, with the Penn State crowd at a volume Klatt said he had never heard there, Mendoza took a hit and delivered.

"The rush is bearing down in his face and he hits Riley Noacowski, their little H-back, right down the seam on the right seam, and just Mendoza gets blasted in the face and delivers a dime," Klatt said. "And now all of a sudden the drive has started."

The Cooper touchdown followed, and Klatt said his veteran broadcast partner Gus Johnson needed a beat to recover. "I've worked with Gus now 11 seasons. This will be our 12th year together in the booth. I've never looked over and been like, is he okay? But that was it."

From there Klatt zoomed out to the data point that Rich had been pointing at on draft night. The graphic compared this century's Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks against Mendoza's college body of work, and Klatt walked through it.

"On average, in this century, so 25 Super Bowl winners at quarterback, the average number of starts in college for all those guys is 3,400 passing attempts, 70 touchdown passes. Mendoza is 35,000 and 71. It is identical," Klatt said.

He then put Mendoza in company with Jayden Daniels, Bo Nix, Caleb Williams and C.J. Stroud, naming a five-season window of NFL quarterbacks who posted 40-plus touchdown passes or fewer than seven interceptions in a season. Mendoza, Klatt said, is the fifth name on that list.

The pitch to Raiders fans, by the end, was simple math dressed up as scouting. Mendoza's college tape and his college numbers both look like the players who have already hit.