You’d think a guy getting ready to make his first NFL start could count on his teammates to give him a little space. A quiet corner of the Raiders’ locker room, maybe. A minute to collect his thoughts between practice periods.
Fernando Mendoza might want to keep his head on a swivel.
Aidan O’Connell, the man who will back him up Sunday against the Seahawks, has taken an interest in easing the rookie’s mind. Asked if he was making an effort to take some of the pressure off Mendoza, O’Connell sounded like a man who had given the matter considerable thought.
“A big attempt, yeah,” O’Connell said.
And how does that work?
“You just try to push him around a lot,” O’Connell said.
Somewhere, a big brother is nodding along.
There are people in baseball who would sooner put a hand on a hot stove than on the guy scheduled to pitch that night. Give the starter his end of the bench. Let him go over the lineup. If he’s got headphones on, whatever you need to tell him can probably wait until tomorrow.
In the Raiders’ quarterback room, good luck making it from one period of practice to the next without somebody giving you a shove.
“He’s super locked in on football, which is awesome,” O’Connell said. “But I try to sometimes get his mind off football. Not too much, but just to mess around with him.”
Imagine trying to find that sweet spot. You want the kid to loosen up a little. You’d also like him to remember the play.
O’Connell has had nine weeks to get a feel for when Mendoza could use a laugh. That’s one advantage football has over baseball in this area. By the time any of these guys gets a minute to himself, he’s already spent half his day sitting next to the guy who’s about to interrupt it.
“I think because we meet for so long and we meet together and we lift together. We do a lot of things together when you’re in the same quarterback room,” O’Connell said.
Mendoza, the first overall pick in the NFL draft, became the Raiders’ starting quarterback when the club traded veteran Kirk Cousins to the Vikings at the trade deadline. O’Connell subsequently moved up to second string. That’s an awful lot of change for three guys who, a few days ago, could walk into a meeting knowing exactly where everybody fit.
And maybe that’s the kindest part of what O’Connell is doing for the kid. Everybody else has spent the week asking Mendoza how it feels to be the Raiders’ new quarterback. O’Connell wanted to make sure he didn’t take the whole thing too seriously.
It’s what friends do.
