Silver And Black Pride
Ever since the Las Vegas Raiders landed the No. 1 pick of the 2026 NFL draft, a popular question in Raider Nation has been: “How does Fernando Mendoza compare to quarterbacks from previous draft classes?” Or some variation of that.
Of course, the answer is subjective and can vary from person to person, and even statistic to statistic. But FTN’s Aaron Schatz, who has developed several popular statistical models to predict or add context to what’s going on in the NFL, offered an interesting finding in the Raiders’ chapter of FTN’s Annual Football Almanac. Schatz’s QBASE and TDYAR/R have Mendoza ranked as the fourth-best quarterback prospect since the 2021 draft class.
To add some context to what that ranking means, below are brief explanations of the two metrics from FTN:
“QBASE 2.0 is a combination of Andrew Healy’s (2015) original QBASE model and Alexandre Olbrecht and Jeremy Rosen’s (2018) functional mobility model. It factors in a quarterback’s college passing statistics adjusted for the quality of his teammates and opponents, plus how many years he started in college. It also incorporates his rushing ability, and while it rewards improvements over time, it penalizes one-year wonders.
“…A value of 0 Total Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement per Attempt (TDYAR/A) is replacement-level, whereas any value over 1.5 is indicative of a Hall of Fame career. We run 50,000 simulations to provide a distribution of the number of times that each quarterback falls within a particular range.”
The 2025 Heisman Trophy winner’s TDYAR/A is 0.57, trailing 2021 No. 1 pick Trevor Lawrence (0.73), 2024 first overall selection Caleb Williams (0.61) and 2021 second pick Zach Wilson (0.60). In the almanac, Schatz notes: “Look, the COVID season was weird,” to humorously explain how Wilson is an outlier in the Top 3.
So, according to this metric, Las Vegas’s new quarterback would be the second-best option if the last three quarterback classes were combined. That includes the highly regarded 2024 class, which produced six first-rounders, with Jayden Daniels (0.34) being the next closest to Mendoza from that year. The list proceeds as follows: J.J. McCarthy (0.26), Drake Maye (0.03), Bo Nix (-0.08) and Michael Penix Jr. (-0.43).
When it comes to last year’s first-round QBs, Mendoza is one spot ahead of Cam Ward (0.38) and several places above Jaxson Dart (0.20, 10th since 2021). Schatz offered some context into the difference between the last two No. 1 overall picks in the Almanac.
“Last year, the QBASE projection system felt higher on Ward than the consensus of the scouting big boards. Ward led college football with 39 touchdown passes and 10.52 adjusted yards per attempt, but Mendoza led college football with 41 touchdown passes and 10.78 adjusted yards per attempt. And yet, the scouting consensus is that Mendoza was a slam-dunk No. 1 overall pick. Ward was eighth on Arif Hasan’s [media consensus] big board at Wide Left, and with a variance of 173.1—higher than any other player in the draft. Mendoza was No....
