“Fernando Mendoza Used to Regularly Stump His Own Law Professor”: Berkeley Law Student Puts Insane Allegations Against Heisman Winner

Following an electric 2025 season that saw him hoist both the national championship and the Heisman trophy as an Indiana Hoosier, Fernando Mendoza now finds himself as the runaway favorite to be the first overall pick of the 2026 NFL Draft. That means that professional scouts and coaching staff alike will now be assessing not just his athleticism, but his attention to detail, pattern recognition, general recall, and the overall state of his mental capacities.

There’s a lot that goes into studying and understanding an NFL playbook, but according to one of Mendoza’s former classmates, the Las Vegas Raiders are going to love what they see in Mendoza when they finally get to interview him and quiz him.

A former UC Berkeley student, claiming to have shared a contracts law class with the future first-overall draft pick during his time at the university, suggested that the professor of their class was notorious for giving student athletes, specifically football players, a hard time. “If you are a football player at Cal, there is, unfortunately, a stereotype,” she noted.

“The professor would ask a law question and then ask one of the football players like, ‘Why is this, this?’ or ‘Why is this that?’ Fernando always knew his shit. Like, he would shut up the professor because he would be so impressed that he knew what was going on, and mind you, this is a law class at Berkeley.”

Suffice to say, Mendoza’s competitiveness extends well beyond the football field, and he wasn’t going to be shown up by some uppity law professor from the West Coast. Although the fan did also suggest that the instructor’s confrontations with student athletes were never hostile and predominantly friendly.

“The professor would always tease football players and most of the football players would tease him back, and it would just be some kind of banter.” she recalled. Nevertheless, that kind of attention to detail and willingness to understand the finer points of any subject is exactly what head coaches and coordinators will be looking for in Mendoza’s upcoming interviews.

Throw in the fact that the 22-year-old has one of the most positive attitudes of any prospect in recent memory, and it’s safe to say that this will be a slam dunk for the Raiders on night one of this year’s draft. “Even though he was being teased by the professor, he would just be smiling. He would answer whenever he was asked. He was such a genuine, humble guy.”

Much has been made of Mendoza’s squeaky clean image, but as more personal testimonies, like this one, begin to come to the forefront, it becomes readily apparent that he is in fact as nice as everyone says he is, and that will certainly go long way in securing him a lengthy career in the National Football League.