Why Josh Hoover is the perfect Fernando Mendoza replacement for Indiana

Since arriving at Indiana, Curt Cignetti has been comfortable playing transfer portal roulette to find his quarterbacks. It worked out in Year 1 with Kurtis Rourke, but reached a new level with Fernando Mendoza’s Heisman Trophy season in 2025, which is still two wins away from a national championship. 

Mendoza has played so well, in fact, that he’s a lock to be a first-round pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, which has forced Cignetti and his staff to spin the wheel once again. This time, it landed on TCU transfer Josh Hoover, who has one season of eligibility left. 

Though Hoover is not the top quarterback in the 2026 transfer portal cycle, a distinction held by former Hoosier Brendan Sorsby, who quarterbacked the team in Tom Allen’s final season, he might be the perfect option for Mike Shanahan’s offense. 

Josh Hoover will be easy to onboard into Mike Shanahan’s system

Hoover can make every throw, and he’s not bad out of structure either. However, more importantly for Indiana’s system, he can make quick decisions. That’s crucial for an offense that is more reliant on RPOs than any other in the country. Hoover should be able to make the transition seamlessly because leaning on the RPO almost as much as Shanahan and Mendoza. 

Now, when many think of an RPO (run-pass-option), they still think of an offense needing a mobile quarterback because the RPO is something of a natural evolution of the read-option QB running games of the early 2010s. Hoover can run it a little bit, as can Mendoza, but that’s really not necessary to stress a defense. 

All you need is a quarterback who can read defenders, make quick throws, and ideally, attack the middle of the field because the linebackers and safeties there are most easily influenced by putting the ball into the belly of the running back. Hoover does that well, producing his second-highest passer rating on throws between the numbers 10-19 yards downfield, which can be something of a honeyhole for RPO and play-action heavy passing games. 

In 2025, Hoover completed 70.9 percent of his throws for 9.0 yards per attempt with 15 touchdowns to five interceptions. A significant improvement from his 62.5 percent completion rate for 7.9 yards per attempt with 13 touchdowns to eight interceptions on traditional dropbacks. His 2.45-second average time to throw off play-action is representative of that RPO reliance. 

Hoover’s Achilles heel

The question facing Hoover as he arrives in Bloomington, one of the country’s premier QB incubators, won’t be whether he can pick up the playbook; it’s whether or not he can cut down on turnovers. 

In 2025, his third season as a starter, Hoover posted the highest turnover-worthy play of his career at 4.4 percent, and though he only threw 13 interceptions (already a high number across 12 games), that number could have been much higher with 21 turnover-worthy plays, the seventh most of any quarterback in the country. 

The thing about Indiana’s coaching staff, however, is that they’ve proven themselves capable of taking a flawed player like Hoover and ironing out the kinks. Mendoza was far from a finished product when he arrived on Cignetti and Shanahan’s doorstep. 

Through his time at Cal, Mendoza posted alarmingly high pressure-to-sack rates, knocking his unit off schedule far too often. That’s not completely out of his game. Still, the improvement from 25.6 percent to 18.3, along with improved pocket navigation that has him stepping up out of trouble to mitigate the damage of a sack, has been more than enough for him to become the best player in the country. 

If Indiana can do that for Hoover’s turnovers, while surrounding him with star power at wide receiver like Michigan State transfer Nick Marsh and Charlie Becker, who should be back for another year, the Hoosiers just might have another Heisman Trophy contender on their hands next fall.