Fernando Mendoza Throws Pick-Six on First Possession, Raiders Rookie QB Roasted Online
Well, that is not how Fernando Mendoza drew it up. The Las Vegas Raiders rookie quarterback, the same Indiana product the franchise took in the 2026 draft class and handed the keys to a rebuild, threw a pick-six on the team’s very first possession of his preseason debut. The internet did what the internet does. The memes started before the extra point.
Mendoza finished the outing 8-of-15 for 86 yards, zero touchdowns and one interception. That interception, of course, was the pick-six. The stat line is not going to end up on the back of a rookie card anytime soon.
Let’s get the reasonable adult stuff out of the way first. It is preseason. Nothing that happened Thursday night matters in the standings. Preseason quarterback play, especially first-drive preseason quarterback play, is famously unreliable as a predictor of anything. Rookies throw picks in August all the time and go on to have long careers. Some of the best quarterbacks of this generation looked shaky in exhibition games and were just fine when the lights came on.
That is the disclaimer. Now the honest part. This still is not what the Raiders wanted to see, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
The Raiders have been chasing the quarterback answer since Derek Carr left. They have tried veterans. They have tried retreads. They have tried the Jimmy Garoppolo experiment. They spent significant capital on Mendoza specifically because they believed he was the guy who could stop this cycle and actually be a starter for the next decade. That is a lot of expectation to put on a player, and the fan base has been primed to react to every rep this fall like it is a trailer for the next season.
The pick-six on the first possession is exactly the kind of clip that lives online forever. It doesn’t matter that the score was zero to zero. It doesn’t matter that half the guys blocking for him will be cut before Week 1. Social media does not do context. It saw a Raiders quarterback throw the ball into the wrong-color jersey and take a nap in the mesh point of the offense, and it went to work.
The film underneath the box score matters more than the box score itself. If Mendoza was showing quick decision-making after the pick, if he was extending plays, if he was throwing with anticipation, that stuff is what evaluators care about right now. Reports out of camp have been mixed. Some days he looks like the top-five pick the Raiders drafted him to be. Some days he looks like a rookie who is trying to process an NFL playbook in real time. Thursday was one of the latter.
Pete Carroll, or whoever is in the head coach’s chair for Las Vegas this year, has a decision to make in the next few weeks. Do you let Mendoza take his lumps as the Week 1 starter and grow through the pain, or do you give him a veteran cushion to buy him a few weeks of development time. Every path has trade-offs. Rushing a rookie into a bad situation has broken plenty of promising careers. Sitting one has occasionally saved them.
The Raiders bet big on Fernando Mendoza. One bad preseason drive does not change that bet. But the runway for a rookie quarterback in a market like Las Vegas is short, and a highlight like Thursday’s pick-six is going to follow him around at least until he wins his first real game.
Preseason is preseason. He needs to be better anyway.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
