Fernando Mendoza’s pick-six went 80 yards the wrong way on his second career pass attempt, and the real story out of the Las Vegas Raiders’ 22-20 preseason win over the Houston Texans isn’t the interception.
It’s that Klint Kubiak never once looked like he was considering pulling him for it.
Everyone’s timeline turned into a highlight reel of Texans linebacker Wade Woodaz reading a check-down on the Raiders’ opening drive and taking it the distance like he’d called it in the huddle himself. Mendoza chased him the entire length of the field and dove for a tackle he had no business attempting. That’s the clip everybody’s replaying. But Fernando Mendoza’s pick-six is only half the story, because the presumptive No. 1 overall pick and reigning Heisman winner stayed in for the whole first half, and the Raiders staff spent their postgame press conference praising the response instead of quietly moving past it.
Vegas trailed 20-3 at the break, against a Texans team that also had its starters parked on the sideline the entire night. Mendoza didn’t get yanked out of panic. He came out at halftime, which is just what a normal preseason rookie rotation looks like, and Aidan O’Connell took over from there.
Kubiak said it plainly afterward: “The response, that’s who he is. I think defensively they covered the play pretty well, and [Woodaz] did a good job stepping in front of our check-down. I gotta go watch it, but the response is what we’ve come to expect from him.”
That’s not a coach making excuses for a rough rookie. Klint Kubiak defends Mendoza’s response in front of the entire press box, on the record, the same week half the internet had already decided the kid was cooked off one bad read.
Maxx Crosby watched the whole sequence from the sideline, and he wasn’t exactly wringing his hands either.
“Yeah, that’s football, you know?” Crosby told reporters. “It’s not gonna be perfect, you know? He’s a rookie. You got to go through, you know, some ups and downs as part of the game, and it’s how you respond.”
The internet, naturally, has not been nearly that generous about crediting Mendoza’s arm strength:
https://twitter.com/HaterReport/status/2090597049720811540
The Raiders needed their offense to actually bail everybody out, and it did. O’Connell drove Vegas 96 yards in eight plays in the final two minutes and capped it himself with a 1-yard touchdown run with 14 seconds left, and Devin Lafayette sealed it with an interception off Brett Rypien on the next possession. Twenty unanswered points after halftime, and a preseason game nobody outside Nevada will remember by October.
Mendoza still finished 8-for-15 for 86 yards with the one throw that’s going to live on Twitter longer than it deserves to. That stat line isn’t nothing, and pretending the pick-six didn’t happen would be its own kind of dishonest.
https://twitter.com/br_betting/status/2090636300520943972
But the Mendoza interception Raiders fans keep replaying on loop was never going to tell you anything about how this organization plans to handle him. The staying-in part did. It happens to every rookie quarterback getting judged off one bad series before he’s thrown a hundred passes, and Houston’s side of that Thursday night mess got the same treatment last year when Stroud had his own shaky outing picked apart by the same crowd.
Kubiak didn’t bench him. Crosby didn’t pile on. The building already decided who Mendoza is, and it did that before the fans finished arguing about it.
