Silver And Black Pride
We’re onto Week 5 in Silver and Black Pride’s Mendoza Mania series, providing film breakdowns on every game from the Las Vegas Raiders’ No. 1 pick of the 2026 NFL Draft, Fernando Mendoza’s last season at Indiana. The theme of this matchup against Iowa was pressure.
The stakes were high for the Hoosiers, as they were on the road to take on a conference opponent that finished the season as a ranked team. And the Hawkeyes gave them just about all they could handle, with Indiana squeaking out a 20-15 victory.
Iowa was bringing the heat with blitz after blitz throughout the contest, and Mendoza was under pressure on 12 out of 30 dropbacks (40 percent), according to Pro Football Focus. That led to an underwhelming stat line with 13 completions on 23 attempts (56.5 percent) for 233 yards, a touchdown and his first interception of the season, as we’ll get a look at how he struggled and succeeded to handle the pressure.
We’ll start with a couple of negative plays to end on a high note, and pocket management was one of Mendoza’s biggest areas of improvement from this game.
Here, Indiana is running a mesh concept, and they get the coverage they were hoping for with Iowa blitzing a linebacker, taking the low hole defender out of the play call while the coverage unit runs Cover 1. With the defense playing man-to-man, the cornerback has to adjust his path to avoid getting picked, leaving Elijah Sarratt wide open with room to run for a first down or more on the short drag route.
However, the right tackle gets beaten around the edge pretty quickly, so the pressure is coming. Mendoza clearly feels it, as he takes a step up in the pocket. However, he starts to move laterally instead of taking one more step up and dumping the ball to Sarratt. That makes the edge-rusher’s job a little easier because it closes the gap between him and the quarterback, and this nearly ends up being a strip sack.
Luckily, the ball just falls incomplete. But it is third down, so this play still leads to a change of possession. What makes it more frustrating is that this could have set up a scoring opportunity had Mendoza stepped up in the pocket a little more instead of drifting into the pressure.
To be honest, this is a tough one for the quarterback because Iowa wins this rep in the huddle with the perfect play call for what Indiana has dialed up.
Pre-snap, the Hawyekes show blitz with one linebacker walked up on the line of scrimmage and the other backer, along with the two safeties, creeping toward the line of scrimmage. On top of that, the safeties have good timing where they come downhill shortly before the snap and before the offense can make an adjustment, audible or alert a hot route.
So, it’s a six-man pressure where both safeties blitz, but the protection scheme has to account for...
