How IU football landed one of transfer portal's top QBs: 'Indiana was the best place for me.'

How IU football landed one of transfer portal’s top QBs: ‘Indiana was the best place for me.’

Posted by author January 3, 2025 Football

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BLOOMINGTON – Fernando Mendoza entered the transfer portal last month eyes wide open, not just to the opportunities potential new programs presented, but to the ways he would be pushed to improve by their coaches.

A third-year sophomore, Mendoza passed for more than 3,000 yards in 2024, in his first full season as Cal’s No. 1 quarterback. After starting the final eight games of his redshirt freshman season, Mendoza showed across-the-board improvement as full-time starter last season. But, with his eyes on the NFL as a long-term goal, Mendoza knew he needed to find a coaching staff and an offense that would push him to be even better.

Through conversations with and interest from a host of programs, including Georgia, Miami and Missouri, the quarterback ranked No. 3 at his position in this year’s portal cycle found what he was looking for in Bloomington.

“I still believe I have a ton of things to get better at,” Mendoza told IndyStar on Friday. “Indiana was the best place for me to make that jump developmentally.”

Across 21 games in Berkeley (20 of them starts), Mendoza passed for 4,712 yards and 30 touchdowns. The Miami native completed 66.5% of his passes helping lead the Bears to back-to-back bowl appearances, and Mendoza cut his interception rate from one every 24.3 attempts as a redshirt freshman to one every 64.3 attempts last season.

Three times last fall, Mendoza was named ACC quarterback of the week.

All of which ranked him among the most in-demand quarterbacks in the transfer window. Indiana jumped into his recruitment as soon as it could.

“The journey is a whirlwind. It happens so fast. My family and I had decided my time at Berkeley had come to an end. It was an amazing chapter in my life,” Mendoza said. “After I entered my name into the portal, a couple very important schools reached out and had great conversations. I tried to get as much information possible on every school.”

The Hoosiers offered obvious appeal.

Dating back to their time at James Madison, head coach Curt Cignetti and offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan have enjoyed substantial success fitting their scheme around transfer quarterbacks. Jordan McCloud won Sun Belt player of the year in his one season working in their offense, in 2023, and Kurtis Rourke was named second-team All-Big Ten while setting numerous single-season IU passing records last fall.

But Indiana also enjoyed an added bonus — the personal experience of Mendoza’s younger brother, Alberto, who redshirted his freshman season in Bloomington in 2024.

“I think having my little brother there, who’s my best friend and the person who pushes me the hardest, it was great to have that, to see his perspective on the coaching staff, the culture,” Fernando Mendoza said.

Mendoza visited Bloomington not long after entering the portal, where he spent time with several returning players. Cignetti’s offense projects to return its top two leading receivers, Elijah Sarratt and Omar Cooper, and IU has added significant depth at running back via the portal as well.

All of which contributed to Mendoza’s decision to commit to Indiana just before Christmas and officially signed with the Hoosiers on Dec. 30. He now joins a quarterback room that will look and feel quite different to the one that helped steer IU through its historic 2024 season.

Rourke is headed for the NFL. His backup, Tayven Jackson, entered the portal after the season ended and landed at UCF.

Tyler Cherry, a four-star prospect in the 2024 class who flipped to IU from Duke after coaching changes, redshirted this year alongside the younger Mendoza. He suffered a non-contact knee injury in the Hoosiers’ CFP preparations and is questionable for fall camp. And the Hoosiers added an incoming high school quarterback, Naperville (Ill.) North’s Jacob Bell, who flipped from Ball State to IU on Christmas Day.

Position coach Tino Sunseri left after the Playoff loss for UCLA, where he’ll coach quarterbacks and call plays for the Bruins. Cignetti tapped Chandler Whitmer, currently pass game specialist with the Atlanta Falcons, as Sunseri’s replacement.

Between time as a graduate assistant at the college level and four years in numerous roles in the NFL, Whitmer has worked alongside several successful quarterbacks, including Justin Fields, Trevor Lawrence, Justin Herbert, Kirk Cousins and Michael Penix. During his recruitment process, Mendoza got the chance to talk with Whitmer, further reinforcing Indiana’s appeal.

Ultimately, all those considerations — his brother’s endorsement, Indiana’s returning talent, the staff’s track record of developmental and competitive success, and the opportunity in front of him — led Fernando Mendoza to Bloomington.

He joins a program Cignetti called “the emerging superpower of college football,” Mendoza’s own dreams aligning with those of a program not content to rest on past success. All of it, Mendoza believes, is within reach.

“That was a huge thing for me, especially having seen their offense have success and having coach Shanahan and coach Cignetti being a part of really being able to grow their team, whether it’s at Elon, JMU or Indiana, all those teams were successful and had really good quarterback play,” Mendoza said. “I just thought, ‘This is a great situation.’”

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