Fernando Mendoza’s historic season just picked up another major line on the résumé.
The former Indiana quarterback was named the 2025-26 Big Ten Conference Jesse Owens Male Athlete of the Year on Wednesday, giving him one more award after a year that already rewrote plenty of Indiana football history.
Mendoza is now the sixth Indiana athlete and the eighth football student-athlete to win the honor. He joins Jimy Spivey, who won for cross country in 1982; Sunder Nix, who took it in track in 1984; Steve Alford, honored in men’s basketball in 1987; Anthony Thompson, who won as a running back in 1990; and Derek Drouin, Indiana’s last winner, in track and field in 2013. The last Big Ten football player to claim the award before Mendoza was Ohio State’s Chase Young in 2020.
The league recognized Mendoza for steering the Hoosiers through a 16-0 season and helping deliver the program’s first-ever national championship. Indiana beat the University of Miami 27-21 on Jan. 19, and Mendoza sealed it with a 12-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter.
That title run came on top of a postseason haul that also included the Big Ten Championship, the Rose Bowl and the Peach Bowl. Mendoza added Indiana’s first-ever Heisman Trophy to the mix as well, after already collecting the Maxwell Award, Walter Camp Award and Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year.
His numbers matched the hardware. Mendoza led the Football Bowl Subdivision with 41 passing touchdowns, a 182.9 passing efficiency rating and 288 points responsible for. He was the only FBS quarterback with six games of four or more touchdown passes and no interceptions, and he found the end zone in every one of Indiana’s 16 games.
For the University of California, Berkeley transfer, the awards kept coming even after college. Mendoza was taken No. 1 overall in the 2026 NFL Draft by the Las Vegas Raiders, and he is set to make his NFL debut against the Miami Dolphins on Sept. 13 in Las Vegas.
Indiana softball player Avery Parker was the school’s female nominee, but the Big Ten female honor went to UCLA women’s basketball star Lauren Betts. Former Indiana swimmer Lilly King remains the school’s only female winner of the award, earning it in 2017 and 2018.
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