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Fernando Mendoza hasn’t signed his Raiders contract. He said so himself this week, telling Front Office Sports he can’t donate to Indiana right now because the money hasn’t come in yet.
“To be completely honest with you, not at the moment. I haven’t even signed my Raiders contract yet,” Mendoza said.
Rookies report to Henderson in 23 days. But, Raider Nation shouldn’t worry.
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The actual contract terms were settled months ago: four years, $57.27 million, a $38.11 million signing bonus, and a fifth-year option. Joel Corry of CBS Sports laid all of it out in detail. Nobody is arguing about the numbers. The fight, to the extent there is one, is about when the Raiders write the check. Mendoza’s camp wants the signing bonus in a lump sum at signing. That’s been the standard for No. 1 overall picks going back to Joe Burrow, and the Raiders know it.
Their history is to stagger those payments: 77.5 percent upfront, the rest in chunks through the fall. That gap is where this sits.
Ty Simpson is unsigned, too, which is no coincidence. The Rams’ first-round quarterback is in a similar spot and Mendoza’s agents are almost certainly watching that situation before making any moves. If Los Angeles cuts Simpson a lump-sum check, the Raiders’ position gets harder to hold.
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What Mendoza is doing in the meantime: taking 25 to 50 extra snaps under center at the team hotel every night after practice. The under-center work is new for him since Indiana ran mostly shotgun, and he’s attacking it the way you’d want your franchise quarterback to attack anything uncomfortable.
New Raiders coach Klint Kubiak said after OTAs that Mendoza “fixes things from one day to the next” and called him “all ball, no B.S.” That’s not a coach filling space. That’s a coach who likes what he’s seeing from a kid who has no business being this prepared this early.
Nakobe Dean put it his own way on NFL Network last week. He said Mendoza has “a lot of aura,” always smiling, and always has something to say to people, brings energy into a building that badly needed some. Dean has been around good football teams. He knows what that presence does to a locker room.
The contract will get done. It’s a matter of mechanics, not a sign that anything is wrong between Mendoza and the organization. But the Raiders would much rather have it behind them when camp opens than hanging over Kubiak’s first week as an NFL head coach.
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