The central claim in Dan Orlovsky’s case for Ty Simpson over Fernando Mendoza has always been that it isn’t just him. That multiple NFL teams share his view that the Alabama quarterback is the better prospect. That he isn’t simply an outlier.
On Wednesday, Daniel Jeremiah said that it hasn’t been his experience.
NFL Network’s lead draft analyst joined Nick Kostos on You Better You Bet on Westwood One Sports and was asked whether he’d heard similar sentiment from around the league after Orlovsky claimed on ESPN that multiple teams ranked Simpson ahead of the Indiana quarterback.
“Obviously, you can talk to different people, but I have not talked to anyone that has that,” Jeremiah said. “That’s not saying that he’s saying anything untrue, he’s just talking to different folks, apparently, than the folks that I’ve been talking to. And that goes from the Raiders, and a bunch of other teams too, and it wasn’t particularly close.”
“You can talk to different people, but I haven’t talked to anyone that has that.”
NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah (@MoveTheSticks) chimes in on @danorlovsky7‘s comments that he and teams he has spoken to have Ty Simpson ranked over Fernando Mendoza. pic.twitter.com/Cxz1Aavxhi
— You Better You Bet (@YouBetterYouBet) March 25, 2026
Jeremiah and Orlovsky had already been through this privately. The two exchanged texts about the Simpson-Mendoza debate roughly a week before Orlovsky hard-launched it on ESPN, and Jeremiah said he came away from those conversations with a clear read on where his friend stood.
“Dan’s a good friend of mine, and long before he went on TV and talked about this opinion, we had shared a lot of text messages back and forth,” Jeremiah said. “The last thing he said was, ‘I finished up all the tape.’ He felt the way he felt, my advice to him was, ‘Hey, if you’ve done all the work, then you can be confident in your opinion, and that’s what your job is to give your opinion.’”
Orlovsky has taken hits from multiple directions over the past few days. Mel Kiper Jr. pushed back on the claim that teams shared his view. On Tuesday, he appeared on The Pat McAfee Show and tried to hold his ground, but nobody on the show let him. McAfee pressed him on the CAA connection and refused to let slide his suggestion that Mendoza hadn’t played in big games — this from a quarterback who led Indiana to the national championship with wins over Oregon, Ohio State, Simpson’s Alabama, and Miami. After the appearance, Orlovsky posted a photo of a laundromat sign about kindness on social media. McAfee said the next day that he loved Orlovsky but hated how he picks fights and plays victim afterward, and mentioned that Orlovsky had declined his FaceTime call the previous night for the first time in their relationship.
“The whole trial balloon of it was an agency favor and all that kind of stuff, well, I’m represented by the same agency, and Ty Simpson is my 38th player and Fernando Mendoza is my number one overall player,” Jeremiah said. “That’s not really how this whole thing works. That was kind of silly to me.”
How this whole thing works has been under the microscope all week, as Orlovsky faces questions about whether he’s falling into the hot-take abyss and whether his credibility as an evaluator is starting to fray at the edges. Jeremiah didn’t question his credibility. But he did say that not one NFL team he’s spoken to — including the Raiders — sees it the way Orlovsky does.
