Fernando Mendoza may not be among the Indiana players heading to the White House later this month.<\/p>\n
The new Las Vegas Raiders<\/a> quarterback was asked Saturday if he had plans to join his teammates from the College Football Playoff-winning team to visit President Donald Trump on May 11. The 2025 Heisman Trophy winner said he might have an understandable conflict.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n \u201cI believe May 11 is the first day of OTAs,\u201d Mendoza said at a news conference on Saturday<\/a> before briefly second-guessing himself on the date of the visit and the start of OTAs. \u201cIf it is on the first day of OTAs, like I said, I\u2019m on the bottom of the totem pole here, I gotta prove myself, I can\u2019t miss practice.\u201d<\/p>\n While Indiana\u2019s visit is set for May 11<\/a>, Mendoza might be able to go if he isn\u2019t required to be in Las Vegas<\/a> for something else. According to the Raiders\u2019 website<\/a>, the first day of OTAs is the following Monday on May 18. Rookie minicamp began for the team on Friday and runs through Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t have the calendar, but as a rookie, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a good look and I want to try to best serve my teammates and I don\u2019t know if that would be accomplishing that goal.\u201d<\/p>\n Mendoza was the No. 1 overall pick of the 2026 NFL Draft<\/a> a week ago as the Raiders unsurprisingly took him ahead of anyone else. Ever since the Hoosiers beat Miami<\/a> for the national championship in January \u2014 heck, even before that \u2014 Mendoza was considered the clear favorite to go No. 1 overall.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean that Mendoza will be starting in Week 1. The Raiders signed Kirk Cousins<\/a> after he was released by the Atlanta Falcons<\/a> to be the team\u2019s bridge starter until new head coach Klint Kubiak feels Mendoza is ready.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, I think that when we\u2019re watching the film, we see Kirk Cousins operate at a very high level so I think it\u2019s going to be very beneficial hearing him talk, observe and just being around him trying to get some osmosis from him in a way where I try to absorb information,\u201d Mendoza said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m really looking forward to that relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fernando Mendoza may not be among the Indiana players heading to the White House later this month. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1327,12,68073,1832,2114,1812,2821,349,99,147059,3123],"class_list":["post-620396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-atlanta-falcons","tag-donald-trump","tag-fernando-mendoza","tag-kirk-cousins","tag-las-vegas","tag-las-vegas-raiders","tag-miami","tag-nfl","tag-sports","tag-the-raiders","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}