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NCAAF CFP Bracket No one in Fernando Mendoza's inner circle saw any of this coming. Michael Reaves / Getty Images Fernando Mendoza was destined to make tears tumble down cheeks. After he posed behind the most prestigious individual award in college football and grabbed hold of the Heisman Trophy with each hand and flashed his wide grin, the Indiana quarterback delivered another of his patented, impassioned speeches filled with authenticity, love and, above all else, humility. Advertisement “This moment, it’s an honor. It’s bigger than me, ” he said on stage Saturday night. “It’s a product of a family, team, community and a whole lot of people who believed in me long before anybody knew my name. ” The 22-year-old redshirt junior, who has led the Hoosiers to a No. 1 overall seed in the College Football Playoff at 13-0 was named the 2025 Heisman Trophy winner Saturday evening in New York City. The 6-foot-5, 225-pounder from Miami not only had a stat line worthy of the designation, but had what all eventual Heisman winners need: Heisman moments. The inch-perfect pass lobbed to wideout Omar Cooper Jr. in the back of the end zone at Penn State that cemented not only one of the most iconic flashpoints of this season but in Indiana football history. The deep ball to receiver Charlie Becker in the Big Ten title game against Ohio State on a third-and-6 from Indiana’s own 24-yard line that went for 33 yards. Mendoza flung it and put it only where his receiver could get it, furthering a drive that would eventually help seal Indiana’s first outright conference title since 1945. His stat line that earned him the Heisman: 33 touchdowns (the most in college football in 2025), six interceptions, 2, 980 passing yards and a 71. 5 percent completion percentage. Mendoza’s Heisman speech was predictably about everything and everyone but him. He credited God. He thanked his parents, Fernando Sr. and Elsa, and his younger brother and roommate, Alberto, his backup on Indiana’s football team. He thanked his grandparents in attendance in Spanish, as the Cuban-American became the second Heisman winner in history of Latin descent. And then the list, the very long list of those from all over the country that listened to Mendoza over the years go on about how much he wanted to master the hardest position in sports. Advertisement In 2022, he was a two-star recruit from South Florida. He was ranked the No. 140 quarterback nationally by 247Sports. He had no Power 4 offers coming out of high school. Some Heisman winners take the long route to the Big Apple. This year’s winner’s route was as circuitous and — when it comes to the glitz of the Heisman — as unpredictable as it has been in the history of the award. He initially committed to live the Ivy League life at Yale, but when Cal offered him, jumped on the opportunity to head west. In three years, he earned his bachelor’s degree. But he sought out an opportunity to get a master’s in football, too. So he entered the transfer portal and soon found a spot in the Midwest, on a roster that featured his younger brother, for a team that had just gone to the Playoff. Hoisting the Heisman isn’t just due to one sensational season. It’s not even due to what some may call recency bias, thanks to a historic conference title. For some, like Mendoza, it’s derived from all the days when no one knew his name. In 247 Sports’ national composite ranking his senior year, he was the 2, 149th high school prospect in his class. The longest of long shots in Heisman history is now part of the most exclusive club in college football. Mendoza’s athleticism comes from both of his parents. His dad played on the same offensive line at Miami Columbus High — an all-boys Catholic school — with University of Miami coach Mario Cristobal in the 1980s. His mother was a star tennis player at Lourdes Academy — an all-girls Catholic school — and went on to play tennis at Miami. It was Elsa, Fernando insists, who taught him how to throw a football. The reality is she taught him how to take a punch and keep fighting for his dreams with a smile on his face. Elsa was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 18 years ago, and she kept her fight private from her sons until recently, when the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 led to her health declining. Advertisement “When I see her fighting so hard and always being optimistic, always having that discipline, always sticking to her routine, it really sets a great standard and example for myself, ” Mendoza said recently in an interview for the Maxwell Award. “My mom is my inspiration, my light, my optimistic source. I talk to my mom probably five or six times a day. ” On stage Saturday night, a teary Mendoza told his mother that the Heisman was as much her trophy as it was his. “You taught me, ” he said, addressing Elsa, “that toughness doesn’t need to be loud. It can be quiet and strong. It’s choosing hope. It’s believing in yourself when the world doesn’t give you much reason to. ” When Fernando decided to leave Belen Jesuit, another all-boys Catholic school in Miami, for rival Columbus in the 10th grade, Elsa got on the phone and called her old high school friend, Sylvie Galvez-Cuesta, the director of Columbus’ prestigious Mas Family honors program (named after brothers Jorge and Jose Mas, majority owners of MLS champion Inter Miami and Columbus High grads). Even though Fernando left Belen to run a more quarterback-friendly offense with the Explorers, Elsa wanted to make sure her son continued to make high-level academics a priority, too. Mendoza signed up for 12 advanced placement classes in his three years at Columbus, including six of the seven courses his senior year when he had a 5. 4 grade point average. He graduated with a 4. 86 GPA. “He was always focused on making sure that his schedule was rigorous, ” said Galvez-Cuesta, who flew to New York to be with the Mendozas on Saturday. “He didn’t want to be a dumb jock. ” Mendoza hosted a podcast in his senior year with three classmates and interviewed Miami’s mayor. He was president of campus ministry and led a Thanksgiving turkey drive with the Miami-Dade police department; they collected 436 turkeys, worth $17, 440, for families in need. Advertisement On the football field, it didn’t take Columbus coach Dave Dunn long to see that his backup quarterback was a highly motivated individual. Fernando would show up to Dunn’s office every day for lunch with a pen and paper. He was also an instant hit the moment he finally got his opportunity to play and start as a junior and senior. No matter how much, though, Dunn tried to get his friends at the college level to give Mendoza a shot, most passed. They didn’t think he was mobile enough. “I was a Division I recruiting coordinator at one point in my life, and I told all of them this kid is gonna be a stud, ” Dunn said. When Mendoza entered the portal in December, Dunn got a lot more phone calls from college coaches than he did four years ago. Now, NFL scouts are the ones blowing up Dunn’s phone. Mendoza’s high school teammates are ecstatic for him. The Explorers’ football team group chat has been electric for the last month, said Ryan Rodriguez, a University of Miami offensive lineman who was a senior at Columbus when Mendoza first took over as the team’s starting quarterback as a junior. The 2020 Explorers that Mendoza led finished 9-0 and won the tri-county championship. The team wasn’t allowed to play for a state title because of the pandemic. The following season, Mendoza led an extremely young team to a 9-4 season and the state semifinals. Every time Mendoza comes home from school, players get together at the lakefront home of Gus Mc Gee, one of Mendoza’s closest friends and a tight end who is a redshirt junior at Charlotte. They go fishing and tubing, and ride jet skis together. “My teammates and I call him Little Brady, ” Rodriguez said. “Now you see him, and he’s a little Kirk Cousins-esque in his personality. He doesn’t cuss. It’s not the worst thing. I love a little nerd in my quarterback. ” Advertisement Rodriguez said he texted Mendoza when he got in the portal in December about transferring to Miami to replace Cam Ward, the No. 1 pick in last year’s draft. In the end, Rodriguez said, Mendoza made the perfect choice in joining Alberto at Indiana. Said Galvez-Cuesta: “Now we just have to hope he’s a Miami Dolphin one day. ” Columbus is celebrating Mendoza’s Heisman by buying billboards around the county to celebrate his achievement, and students are being encouraged to come to school Monday dressed in Hoosiers’ red. “If there were 25 hours in the day, ” Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said earlier this season, “he’d spend all 25 preparing to be great. ” Thousands of miles away from home on the West Coast, Mendoza redshirted as a true freshman in 2022 and went into the 2023 season as a third-string Cal quarterback with only his immeasurable desire to rise up the ladder to guide him. Those were the headset days. Back when Mendoza wore a thin jersey to cover up his No. 15 and helped signal in plays to incumbent quarterbacks ahead of him. So he took it upon himself to find ways to learn more, learn faster, to be best prepared for the opportunity if it were to present itself. Third-stringers don’t get much one-on-one time with offensive coordinators, so Mendoza asked Cal’s former tight ends coach, Tim Plough, if they could meet. From 9 p. m. to midnight, the two sat in the coaches’ office inside California Memorial Stadium and reviewed not only game film, but practice film, too. Mendoza, a renowned note-taker, carries old-school computation notebooks with him to write things down by hand. And, like a mind trying to solve a vexing equation, he would go over notes again and again in his head. “I’ve had guys that have had that same intensity and same approach to football, ” said Plough, now the head coach at UC Davis, “but I have never coached a guy who approached everything that way. ” Advertisement Mendoza graduated from Cal’s revered Haas School of Business as a business administration major. He took internships at real estate investment firms ACRE and Newmark in the Bay Area. He would race from practice to his car to change into a shirt and tie and drive through traffic to get there on time. Former Cal quarterback and radio play-by-play analyst Mike Pawlawski became one of Mendoza’s mentors. When Pawlawski would invite Mendoza over to dinner at his home in the East Bay, Mendoza would hang on every word, so much so that if he felt like they were going to engage in a conversation about elevating mental performance, Mendoza often had his hand in his backpack, reaching for his notebook before Pawlawski could even finish his thought. “I’ve told him a million times he can call me ‘Mike’ or ‘Coach, ’” Pawlawski said, “and he still calls me ‘Mr. Pawlawski. ’” Mendoza made his first career collegiate start in a 52-40 loss to No. 15-ranked Oregon State on Oct. 7, 2023. From that point on, he flourished. Even as Cal’s offensive play callers and ideologies shifted from year to year, Mendoza proved adaptable. In 2024, he started for the eventual 6-7 Golden Bears, a season highlighted by a 98-yard fourth-quarter drive to beat rival Stanford. After the win, Mendoza’s rousing interview on the field, complete with his signature voice cracks, provided the college football world a glimpse into No. 15. The term “going 98 yards with my boys” became a staple within the Cal football community. “What makes him special is he’s willing to do all the work and his ego never gets in the way, ” Pawlawski said. A year later, Mendoza was once again delivering a message the only way he could into the microphone inside Lucas Oil Stadium after leading the Hoosiers to a Big Ten crown. So cognizant of the moment, he didn’t want to drop an f-bomb on live TV so in his haze of excitement, he said, “Now the Hoosiers are flippin’ champs. ” Indiana’s athletic department took a Mendozian approach to its Heisman campaign that began ramping up last month. The “Heis Mendoza” campaign hit the social media site Linked In, because that’s the only social media presence Mendoza has. Advertisement “His Linked In is for real, ” said Fernando Sr. , a pediatric emergency doctor in Miami. “That’s a great homage to his true self. ” “That’s really the only social media he really has, ” Elsa said. The Linked In page lists his academic accomplishments, which include getting his MBA from Indiana’s Kelley School of Business. Under Top Skills, it lists: “Relationship Building • Works Well Under Pressure • Team Leadership • Skilled Multi-tasker • Touchdown Passes & High Fives. ” All of which were highlighted in what was the centerpiece of his Heisman highlight reel played Saturday night when, in the face of two Penn State defenders, Mendoza floated that pass to Cooper Jr. earlier this year. His parents say he does not tremble when faced with such a pressure-filled moment. “Somewhere in there it’s in his DNA, ” Fernando Sr. said. “When he’s out there, he just locks in in the moment and goes into what the youngins call ‘a flow state. ’” There wasn’t time for any sort of flow state in the conference title game. Eight seconds into the tilt to decide who would win the Big Ten and earn the No. 1 overall seed in this year’s Playoff, Mendoza was rocked on a hit by Ohio State’s Caden Curry. In an appearance on “The Pat Mc Afee Show” last week, Mendoza called it “a total gutshot. ” There was Mendoza, on the biggest stage of a career nobody beyond his inner circle ever saw coming, grasping at the turf in Indianapolis, trying to inhale without pain. In those agonizing seconds, he told himself he could stay down and let the pain win, or he could find a way to rise. In a tribute to her son, Elsa released a letter to Fernando on “The Players’ Tribune” this week, delving into all the days that built him into the person he is today. She reminded him that when he first started playing pee wee football, his declaration that he wanted to be a quarterback was soon met with a spot down a little kid’s depth chart: He was a QB4. At the floor level of a depth chart or buried thousands deep in high school rankings, it never bothered him much. He liked a challenge, because it meant he could learn and apply it to make himself that much better. Advertisement It paid off. When Mendoza was done scanning the room, thanking those in attendance, he turned to the camera and gave a message to every kid who feels overlooked or underestimated: Rankings can’t properly measure one’s own insatiable drive, and that aspirations, no matter how impossible, can be attained. “I was you, ” he said.