IrishRaid🔥

Fernando Mendoza makes his first NFL start on Sunday, and a fan has asked everyone at Allegiant Stadium to stay in their seats when he scores. The post went up Tuesday, the same day the Raiders made the quarterback change official, and it has been seen more than 730,000 times since. "Stay seated when Fernando scores his first touchdown. Will be an epic gesture from fans to player. Pass it along." The man who wrote it is Tom Joanides. Somebody replied underneath asking what the point of it was, which is a fair question if you do not know the family. His father does not stand up. Fernando Mendoza Sr. stays in his seat when his son does something worth standing for, and he did it at the Peach Bowl last year, where somebody filmed it and it went around the internet. He did it at the Heisman ceremony. He did it in April. His wife Elsa has had multiple sclerosis for about 18 years and she watches from a wheelchair, so he sits. It is not an accident either. "Yeah, it's for sure a conscious effort." Madison Williams of Sports Illustrated laid the whole thing out on draft night. Mendoza stayed home in Miami instead of going to the draft, and when the Raiders took him he went to his mother first, ahead of everybody, and his father leaned over and hugged him from the chair while the rest of the room was on its feet. Elsa put a letter to her son in The Players' Tribune last December, thanking him for making her years with it easier than they would have been, and people keep coming back to one line in it. "You've made me feel seen." That is the thing a stadium is being asked to do on Sunday afternoon. The football part is that on Tuesday the Raiders traded Kirk Cousins to Minnesota and handed the job to a rookie the same day, and general manager John Spytek picked his words carefully about it. "I want to stop short of saying he's earned it." Mendoza has been on an NFL field exactly once, late in a loss to New England in week 5, and he went 6 for 8 for 48 yards. Now Seattle comes to Las Vegas, and Seattle is the better team right now. Joanides followed up a day later and tagged the MS Society. "Fernando's dad stays seated to celebrate with Fernando's mom. I find it touching and cool." Nobody official is behind any of this. The Raiders have not asked anyone for anything, a full stadium cannot really be organized from one phone, and plenty of people who saw the post have no idea why they are being asked to sit down. He also has to score first, which Seattle gets a say in. But the idea is out there now, and it only works if enough people hear the reason before Sunday. If he gets in, and the building stays down, his father will not be the only one sitting for once.