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14 hours ago
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Ever since the NCAA changed its rules in 2021 to allow student athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, institutional money has been circling college football, desperate for a way to turn top programs into money-making machines. These incursions have had limited success to date.
Perhaps the private equity and venture capital vultures have been approaching things the wrong way. Instead of building a fully financialized and business-friendly college football league, why not start with the players? When Fernando Mendoza emerges, as he almost certainly will, as the No 1 overall pick of the NFL draft on Thursday night, his coronation will not only cap a remarkable personal story – it will also mark the ascendancy of a specific idea of the modern football player. Mendoza’s story is extraordinary. Ranked as the 140th-best quarterback prospect by respected college recruiting website 247Sports in 2022, as he was applying for college, he rose through the ranks at the California Golden Bears, earning both his stripes as a starting quarterback and an undergraduate business degree in three years. Last year he transferred to Indiana, winning the Heisman Trophy as he led the Hoosiers to an undefeated season and the national championship. His rise is a tribute to dedication, hard work, grit, determination – all qualities NFL franchises look for when scouring the college field for prospects.
But Mendoza does not just embody these traits – he articulates them too, with the kind of fluency and confidence ordinarily associated with those running the NFL rather than playing it. Where most college and professional footballers are in thrall to Instagram and TikTok, posting reels and clowning about for promotional clout, Mendoza maintains just one social media account: LinkedIn. On the professional networking site, one of just two apps that Mendoza says he has on his phone (the other is YouTube), the quarterback looks virtually indistinguishable from the founders, AI freaks, sales bores, and productivity hucksters who populate the average user’s feed. On his profile page, a professional headshot – suit sharp, hair tidy, gaze firm, smile open – gives him the appearance of an ambitious young real estate agent; the photo is bordered with a hashtag banner announcing that Mendoza is #opentowork. Coming from any other 22-year-old getting ready to earn tens of millions as a professional athlete you might mistake this for some kind of prank, but as you scroll down you realize this self-presentation is entirely serious. Mendoza’s father, a pediatrician in Miami, has stated that his son’s LinkedIn is “for real”.
Mendoza is a “process-driven and detail-oriented leader”, he writes, whose experience as a quarterback demonstrates skills in “leadership, time management, and communication” and who is “passionate” about “leveraging” his “background in business, real estate, and finance to build a career that combines strategic thinking, teamwork, and community impact”. Not only does this young man look like he’s ready for the corporate suite – he sounds like he’s already in it. Mendoza is the NFL rookie as LinkedIn poster, and everything about his manner anticipates a world to come in which on-field competition and off-field strategy, football and money, athleticism and investment – in both professional and college football – will blur into one another.
Famous players usually take some time to adjust to retirement, and the transition from on-field hero to off-field analyst, businessman, actor, or motivational speaker does not always come naturally – just look at Tom Brady, who’s now paid handsomely as a pundit and has committed serious money to various sporting ventures, but still looks like a summer intern doing a sound check any time he’s given a microphone and forced to speak into a camera. Mendoza displays none of the awkwardness that might be expected of a graduate getting ready for his first job – if anything he’s too sales-y, too confident, too eager to squeeze his chosen sport for the treacle of its “teachable moments”.
This preachiness makes a little more sense when you consider the importance that religion plays in his life. Virtually every one of Mendoza’s public utterances, from his first reaction to the Hoosiers becoming national champions to his acceptance speech for the Heisman Trophy, have begun with him thanking God, often in a para-pubescent croak that serves as a reminder that this is a man still emerging from the tremblings of adolescence. One of his first acts upon winning the Heisman was to carry the trophy to the priests at his college as a gesture of thanks for their guidance and support. (“I’m a Catholic,” Mendoza explained.) He’s fond of quoting the Stoics and has stated that he believes in the power of delayed gratification but even at moments of unguarded joy his words carry a churchly, moderate, Ned Flanders-esque cast: “The Hoosiers are flippin’ champs, let’s go!” he exclaimed in January after guiding Indiana to their national title.
A career-oriented grinder who’s all about faith, family, and football: this is the type of character the NFL loves, and around which it could plausibly build its future. And yet, there is always a rawness there too, real feeling: it’s not unusual for Mendoza to appear on the verge of tears when living the footballing highs and squeaking through his sideline interviews. This is all part of the man’s strange appeal: he projects managerial calm off the field and volcanic emotion on it. Just when you think you’ve got him pinned, Mendoza throws up some fresh verbal oddity or vocal tic to keep things interesting; he always does just enough to evade caricature.
If Mendoza approaches football like he’s an ambitious college grad climbing the corporate ladder, that’s perhaps because – like his idol Brady, whose beginnings in professional football were famously inauspicious – he’s had to scrap to get to the top of the heap. Reaching the pinnacle of college football after being ranked 2,149th in his high school class takes real character, an ascent in keeping with the personality he showed from his very beginnings in the sport: as a child he was originally seen as a fourth-choice quarterback in park football but as his mother wrote recently, Mendoza remained undeterred, worked hard, and eventually got his chance to shine as his team’s playmaker. That sense of patience is perhaps the defining attribute of the player he’s become – an attribute on display, most spectacularly, in the calm assurance of his perfectly weighted pass to set up a dramatic game-winning touchdown against Penn State last November.
At 6ft 5in and 230lb, Mendoza has an impressive physical presence, but he doesn’t have spectacular passing range or a rocket arm, and he’s not exactly a schemer around the pocket either: the most common knock on him as a player is that he’s the classic style of quarterback who needs good runners around him to land his passes, rather than an orchestral genius working magic with the ball. What he does have, however, is that most mystical and coveted of on-field qualities – a high football IQ – along with the conviction to be decisive in the clutch. The highlight of his time at Cal was a 98-yard fourth quarter drive in 2024 to defeat arch-rival Stanford, and while the drive itself was spectacular and carried all the persistence and implacability that have defined Mendoza’s career, what it’s really remembered for is the emotional post-game interview he gave, in which – no surprise – he first gave “all the glory to God” for what his team had just pulled off. Asked what he would remember about the day, Mendoza replied, “I’ll remember going 98 yards with my boys,” a phrase that has since become part of Golden Bears legend.
More than anything he does with the football in hand, it’s this ability to memorialize, frame, and package on-field moments that sets Mendoza apart from his peers. In a sport that is increasingly a business, Mendoza is already a master of all the things that are downstream of events on the field: content, analysis, marketing. Professional football presents a novel challenge in the saga of Fernando: this will be the first real chapter of his career in which he is seen as the next big thing rather than a mere striver out to prove the world wrong. Can he meet the pressure of expectation? Whatever the fate of Mendoza the professional footballer, Mendoza the talker, the LinkedIn poster, the over-emoter will be appointment viewing in the years to come.
