Fernando Mendoza Threw a Pick Six on His Third Pass, Aidan O'Connell Cleaned Up the Rest of It, and the Raiders Won 22 to 20 in Houston

Twenty two points, three touchdowns, one made extra point out of three, and a one yard sneak with fourteen seconds left. The most Raiders win imaginable, and the rookie has a lot of film to sit through.

Here's the thing about watching this team from up here, three states and one very bitter divorce away from where they used to play: you never stop reading the box score. You tell yourself you're done. You aren't done. So on Thursday night, while the other game involving a California team was busy being a party, the Raiders were in Houston assembling the single most Raiders sequence of events available to a football team, and yes, obviously, we read all of it.

They fell behind seventeen to nothing in the first quarter. The first overall pick in the draft threw a pick six on his third professional pass. And then they won the game, twenty two to twenty, on a one yard quarterback sneak from Aidan O'Connell with fourteen seconds on the clock. If you had told a room full of people in 2003 that this would be the shape of a Raiders night in 2026, nobody would have blinked. The uniform changed cities. The genre didn't.

Start with the pick six, because that's what everybody is going to remember. Fernando Mendoza is the Heisman winner who took Indiana to a national championship and then went first overall, and this was supposed to be the night he started looking like all of that. Third pass of the game. Wade Woodaz reads it, takes it eighty yards the other way, and it's fourteen to nothing before the rookie has completed anything worth writing down. Woody Marks had already run one in from twenty. Ka'imi Fairbairn tacked on from fifty one. Seventeen points in a first quarter, against a defense that's supposed to be the finished half of this roster.

Mendoza finished eight of fifteen for eighty six yards with the interception, a passer rating of forty two point six, and a first half only workload. Afterwards he said there's a lot more learning to do, that this level is a whole step further and the margins are so small that one tiny mistake can lead to catastrophe. That's a rookie describing his own pick six with more composure than most veterans manage, and honestly it's the most encouraging thing he did all night.

What actually won the game. O'Connell came out for the second half and went fifteen of twenty four for a hundred and sixty six yards with nothing given away, and the run game finally turned over. Mike Washington Jr. nine carries for fifty six. Dylan Laube six for thirty seven and a four yard touchdown. Dare Ogunbowale four for thirty five and a nineteen yard touchdown. A hundred and fifty nine rushing yards isn't nothing when the entire premise of a Kubiak offense is that you're supposed to be able to hand the ball off and mean it.

Four hundred and twelve yards. That's the number that survives the night. Houston finished with two hundred and nineteen. The Raiders nearly doubled up a playoff team on total offense with their starting quarterback standing on the sideline in a cap, and they still needed a sneak in the final minute, because the kicking went sideways in a way that would be funny if it weren't the sort of thing that loses actual games in October. Matt Gay hit from fifty two. Kansei Matsuzawa went one for three on extra points. Three touchdowns and one extra point is how a team scores twenty two.

The Kirk Cousins arrangement. He didn't play. Most of the starters didn't play, which is the whole reason a rookie was out there throwing his third pass into traffic in the first place. We got into all of it in the season preview and nothing on Thursday changes the read: this is a team that spent real money on a quarterback in his late thirties and then drafted the guy who's going to take the job from him, and everybody involved has to walk around pretending that's a normal way to build a football team.

The injuries. Chigozie Anusiem went off on a cart with a knee. Buddy Johnson took a shot to the shoulder and came back. In August one of those is a story and one is a footnote, and you don't find out which for about ten days.

Kubiak, afterwards. He said they have another week of playing and that he doesn't want anyone to be comfortable in their job. Standard preseason coach speak, except that this is a roster where the bottom twenty five spots are genuinely open, and a fifty two yard field goal sharing a night with two missed extra points is exactly the kind of thing that ends somebody's summer.

Where it leaves them. One and one, in a preseason nobody should read too closely, with the first overall pick sitting on one bad quarter and one good quote. Last week they played their actual starters and got run out of their own building by Arizona, which we wrote up in the week one recap. This week they sat everybody and won. Preseason is a coin. What you can say is that the ball came out of the backfield well, the second unit didn't fold at seventeen to nothing, and O'Connell is still the most competent thing on that quarterback depth chart even when he's nominally third in line.

And for the record, on the very same night, the team that stayed put hung forty one on the Chargers at SoFi. We wrote that one up as well, 49ers 41, Chargers 17, and it's a much more enjoyable read. But this is the Bay Area, and a lot of us have a silver and black thing buried somewhere that we've never properly dealt with, so here we're at eleven at night reading a preseason box score out of Houston. The rest of the league coverage sits on the NFL page.

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