The Las Vegas Raiders plan to give rookie quarterback Fernando Mendoza first-team reps this summer even as they line Kirk Cousins up to open the season under center. First-year head coach Klint Kubiak will “sprinkle” the No. 1 overall pick in with the starters as he eases him along, SI’s Albert Breer reported this week.
It is a measured plan for a franchise that spent the top pick in the draft on its intended long-term answer. Cousins, signed in free agency, remains the favorite to start Week 1, and the reason traces back to Minnesota: Kubiak coached him there as quarterbacks coach from 2019-20 and again as offensive coordinator in 2021, a stretch that produced two of Cousins’ four Pro Bowl nods. That familiarity buys the Raiders time to bring Mendoza up to NFL speed rather than rush him into the lineup.
The adjustment in front of the rookie is real. Mendoza, the 2025 Heisman winner and national champion at Indiana, took just five snaps from under center across 36 college games, per NFL.com’s Kevin Patra. Kubiak’s offense asks for the opposite: he leaned heavily on under-center, run-first looks during coordinator stops with the Vikings, Saints and Seahawks. The first-team reps, then, are less an audition than a classroom — a way to get Mendoza comfortable with footwork and cadence he barely used in college, against defenses that will punish hesitation.
The reps come with a caveat, because Mendoza still has not signed. He is one of only six players from the 2026 draft class without a deal as rookies prepare to report to Henderson on July 23, with the first practice set for July 29. The value is not in dispute — his four-year pact projects to roughly $57.27 million with a $38.11 million signing bonus under the rookie wage scale — but, as In The Rafters detailed last week, the holdup centers on the payment schedule for that bonus. Every No. 1 overall pick since 2020 has received a lump-sum bonus; the Raiders have historically paid theirs in installments.
Holdouts have been rare since the rookie wage scale arrived in 2011, and it would be a surprise if this one dragged much past the report date. Once the paperwork clears, the picture is straightforward: Cousins runs the offense, and Mendoza gets a controlled taste of first-team football while he learns a system built to hide a rookie’s growing pains rather than expose them.
