BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (WDRB) — Fernando Mendoza did not have to throw on Wednesday.
That's the first thing to know, and maybe the most important.
The prince of Indiana's impossible football year, the Heisman winner, the quarterback of a national champion, the presumed No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft, had no stopwatch to beat and no real burden left to satisfy.
He could have stood at Indiana football's Pro Day off to the side in a hoodie, smiled for the cameras, shaken hands with the men from Las Vegas and New York and every other NFL city, and nobody would have held it against him.
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Instead, he picked up a football and went to work like a man helping his friends move.
So, there he was in the John Mellencamp Pavilion, with ESPN and NFL Network beaming out live pictures of a place that, not long ago, would not have been anybody's national destination on a spring afternoon. This is what a championship changes. It changes the trophies in the case, yes. But it also changes the traffic. It changes the accents in the room. It changes whose logos are on the pullovers leaning against the back wall. It changes who shows up to watch.
Indiana football had become a live television event in April.
And Mendoza, who was not technically "working out," proceeded to throw 56 passes and complete 53 of them anyway.
That is the sort of sentence that barely seems fair in a staged environment. Three incompletions. Two of them were drops. One slight overthrow on a deep ball. Not a workout, exactly. More like a clinic with spiral rotation. He had warmed up with roughly three dozen throws before that, because some people stretch before a jog and some quarterbacks apparently prepare for pro day as if they are opening a Broadway show.
He also weighed in at 236 pounds, 11 more than he carried at the combine a month ago, which tells you that while the rest of the football world was admiring what Fernando Mendoza had been, Fernando Mendoza had already moved on to what he thinks an NFL quarterback has to become.
He said as much, in his own understated way.
"I'm just trying to be the best me possible," he said. "And in that aspect, whatever team picks me, you only need one team to believe in you, whether you're the first pick, whether the last pick, whatever. I'm just trying to be the best quarterback I can be in September, rather than right now here in April."
That is usually how the real ones talk. The counterfeiters talk about April. The serious ones talk about fall.
And if this had only been about Fernando Mendoza the prospect, it still would have been a show. He has that kind of rhythm to him. He throws with the calm of a man dropping letters into the right mailbox. He does not appear to aim so much as remember where the ball belongs. Wednesday only reinforced what the tape already says: the thing he does best is make difficult passing look almost offensively routine.
But the lovelier part of the day is that Mendoza kept insisting it was not really about him at all.
"The main goal today was to serve my teammates, and I think that I was able to do that, be able to put them in a position where they're able to make plays, show what they got," Mendoza said.
He said he wanted all nine draft-eligible Hoosier pass-catchers to get their best possible showcase. He said the script was longer because he wanted everybody to run routes applicable to what they'll be asked to do in the NFL. He said he came back because those are his best friends for life.
Now, athletes say generous things all the time in these settings. It is part of the liturgy of draft season. Everybody praises everybody. Everybody loves the process. Everybody is humble and hungry and blessed and excited for the opportunity.
But this one had fingerprints on it.
Riley Nowakowski said Mendoza had been there for days, throwing early, going through the script repeatedly with each different teammate so everything would look clean and beneficial for the others. Roman Hemby said the same thing in his own language.
"He doesn't have to do some of the things that he does," he said. "But he goes out there and he wants to help showcase the rest of the guys… That just goes to show you what type of person he is."
It also tells you something about what Indiana was this past season, and maybe what separated it from the usual one-hit wonder. Championship teams are always sold to the public as collections of stars. They are easier to market that way. The quarterback. The closer. The future first-rounder. The great coach with the unforgettable line.
But inside the building, titles are usually won by people who keep doing one more thing they did not have to do.
One more throw. One more rep. One more walkthrough. One more day back in town for the sake of somebody else's future.
That was all over this pro day. It hung in the building like the last note after a Mellencamp concert.
Because for all the NFL juice in the room, all the radar and clipboards and high-definition scrutiny, this was also, unmistakably, a reunion.
One last gathering of the national champions before they go become separate men again. Hemby spoke about the quick turnaround from a season that ended Jan. 19 and how strange it was to go straight into training after playing deeper into the winter than almost anyone else. Nowakowski called the day bittersweet, said the players would get together later to say their final goodbyes, and talked about walking around the building seeing old teammates and feeling the road finally run out.
They went to dinner Wednesday night and laughed and swapped old stories that will take on a legend of their own. What they felt, if not what they knew, was that they had been on a football field in a competitive situation together for the last time.
"It definitely is a little bit bittersweet," Nowakowski said. "You get to the end of the road… we did everything we sought out to do, but it's the end of the road."
Mendoza felt it too. With as much as there is in front of him, he took a look back as he left the facility.
"It was a little moment of gratitude," Mendoza said of the time with his teammates. "Looking at all those guys and really seeing the special moments I've had with each individual. … It's really unlikely we'll all play on the same team again."
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