Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM MARCH 2026 5 F ernando Mendoza caught the ire of curious questioners when he won the Heisman Trophy last year. Plenty of them. Skeptics scoured his statistics and deemed them not worthy of the most coveted individual award in college football. In some ways, they had a point. Mendoza, for instance, threw for the fewest passing yards of any of the three quarterbacks who were invited to New York City for the trophy presentation. His total of 2,980 at the time of the cer- emony was the lowest since Cam New- ton had 2,589 in 2010. Mendoza, though, had something mightily important in common with Newton as it related to their respective Heisman résumés. He can certainly hold his own as a runner, as evidenced by his improbable fourth-quarter touchdown takeoff in the national championship game that ended up being the decisive score in Indiana's win over Miami, but athleticism is not what we're getting at. It's wins and losses. More specifically, none of the latter. Not one. Newton ran the table on his way to his Heisman triumph 16 years ago. Men- doza did the same 15 years after Newton. Meanwhile, the other quarterbacks who accompanied Mendoza to NYC did not win all of their games. Ohio State's Julian Sayin lost to none other than Mendoza in the Big Ten Championship Game the week before the Heisman was awarded. Vanderbilt's Diego Pavia lost twice in the regular season. That's where Notre Dame's CJ Carr comes in. A current co-favorite for the 2026 Heisman with Texas quarterback Arch Manning, according to FanDuel Sports- book, Carr has the most traversable course to cementing himself as one of the game's greats by way of claiming the hardware by winning all 12 of the Fight- ing Irish's regular season games and let- ting everything else take care of itself. Manning may well end up with Carr in New York City at the end of the year. And he may well have better stats than him, too. But the odds of Manning running Texas' table are longer than Carr navigating the Irish to perfection through their own. The Longhorns face Ohio State in a nonconference heavyweight bout plus three SEC teams that made the 2025 College Football Playoff. The Irish face one such team that made the 2025 CFP: Miami. It's way too early to seize up Carr ver- sus Manning in the Heisman race. As we see every year, there will be differ- ent names in the mix by the time it's actually worth rationalizing who has a legitimate shot of winning it. But say Carr is one of those names. His chances of becoming Notre Dame's record-setting eighth Heisman winner would be tremendously enhanced by the Irish having a goose egg in the loss column. Mendoza's Heisman moments came when the Hoosiers had their backs against the wall and their fearless quar- terback willed them to victory. Vic- tories, rather. Plural. At Iowa. At Or- egon. At Penn State. Against the big, bad Buckeyes in the Big Ten title game. Mendoza was the man time and again. It won him the Heisman. And his makeup was ultimately enough to win his team a national championship. Watching Carr in his first season as a starter in 2025 told us he's capable of the double whammy in 2026. He can't control what his peers accomplish, and being that football is the ultimate team sport, the 12-0 record that would go a long way in his Heisman campaign isn't tied solely to his own doing either. Like Mendoza did with an exquisite defense and impressive playmakers, Carr will need help to become college football's most outstanding player. Here's something that helps; what could be Carr's second and final season as Notre Dame's starter is shaping up to be a revenge tour of sorts for the Irish. They felt slighted in being snubbed from the playoff, and they're out to prove to everyone they deserved to be in the previous field by tearing through the subsequent season. By leaving no doubt. In the process, Carr could put a personal stamp on the 2026 college football season in a similar way as Men- doza did in 2025. Winners get noticed. Winners get trophies. Unblemished records aren't a prerequisite for winning the Heis- man, but they certainly don't hurt. And sometimes, they're the tiebreaker. Mendoza won in a landslide over Pa- via, but what if he didn't have Indiana's undefeated positioning to fall back on? Maybe he'd have been tied with his con- ference counterpart, Sayin, and it would have been Pavia's unrivaled accolades as a dual-threat that took him over the top. We'll never know because Mendoza never lost. Not once. If Carr can do the same this year, and be a more polished, more mature ver- sion of the highly impressive signal- caller he was as a redshirt freshman, he'll be right there in the end among Heisman contenders. He may even win it. There's prece- dent for him to do so. ✦ Notre Dame quarterback CJ Carr completed 66.6 percent of his passes for 2,741 yards with 24 touchdowns and 6 interceptions as a redshirt freshman. PHOTO BY MICHAEL MILLER Team Wins Are The Key To Unlock A Heisman Résumé Tyler Horka has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since July 2021. He can be reached at thorka@blueandgold.com GOLDEN GAMUT TYLER HORKA