Cal Alum Steve Bartkowski Preceded Cal Grad Fernando Mendoza as a No. 1 NFL Pick

When Cal graduate Fernando Mendoza is officially announced as the No. 1 overall pick in Thursday’s NFL draft a salary awaits him that will be nearly 100 times greater than what Cal alumnus Steve Bartkowski earned as the No. 1 overall pick 51 years earlier.

“He’ll earn as about as much in three games as a I did in my career,” Bartkowski joked this week.

These days the 73-year-old Bartkowski is living comfortably in Twin Bridges, Montana, a town of about 400 people (and he claims it’s really half that size). He serves as a host and former breakfast chef at Ruby Drake Lodge, a bucolic venue operated by his son that caters to avid trout fishermen.

“Living the dream as they say,” said Barkowski.

The fact that he is living at all was in question 20 years ago. Technically he was dead in 2006.

He had just recovered from a long, arduous battle with colon cancer that required the removal of a long section of his colon when he decided to have knee replacement surgery on both of his football-scarred knees.

The 53-year-old Bartkowski was trying out his new knees when blood clots developed and he passed out. Technically, he died.

“It was a code blue,” Bartkowski said.

Code blue is the hospital term for cardiac arrest or respiratory arrest. It requires immediate resuscitation and less than 20 percent of code-blue patients survive.

“They tell me I was gone,” he said.

Bartkowski survived.

“I tell people I got all my old-age stuff out of the way early,” he said.

His knee replacements are still in working order, which is no small matter for former quarterbacks who played 12 years in the NFL.

Bartkowski’s road to the NFL started at Cal after he won a two-year quarterback competition with Vince Ferragamo, causing Ferragamo to transfer to Nebraska, Bartkowski became an Associated Press first-team All-America selection in 1974 for a Cal team that finished with a 7-3-1 record.

Two or three days before the 1975, NFL draft, which took place on January 28, Bartkowski got a call from Atlanta Falcons coach Marion Campbell, who told him that the Falcons had made a trade with Baltimore to obtain the No. 1 pick and that Bartkowski would be that pick.

“It was kind of a shock,” Bartkowski said.

So Bartkowski made the trek to New York City so that he could stand with then-commissioner Pete Rozelle in a hotel room when the selection was announced. No other drafted players were present.

There was no live television, no green room filled with draft hopefuls, no pomp and circumstance. Just Rozelle and Bartkowski, in a borrowed jacket, in a big room.

There had been no Combine, no workouts for NFL teams, no predraft interviews with NFL scouts, no 40-yard dash times, no intelligence tests.

NFL teams made picks based solely on film study.

Draft candidates did not undergo predraft physicals back then, because if they had, Bartkowski probably would not have been the first pick.

You see, in the fourth game of the 1974 season Bartkowski had suffered a “pretty severe” separated right shoulder. So he didn’t throw much in practice after that, played hurt the rest of the season and earned All-America status. That's just what you did then.

He claims he could still throw the ball a long way – perhaps not as far as the 103-yard throw he had produced to enable a teammate to win a bet with a skeptical observer a few years earlier, but far enough to convince the Falcons he should be the No. 1 pick.

When he was drafted, Bartkowski dropped out of Cal, and when Jared Goff became the second Cal player to be drafted No. 1 overall in 2016, Goff still was a year shy of graduation, although he claimed at the time he would eventually get his diploma.

So even though Mendoza will be identified as being from Indiana, he will be the first player with a Cal degree in hand – from the Haas School of Business, no less – to be the first overall pick in an NFL draft.

Mendoza is expected to get a four-year contract worth over $55 million.

Back in 1975, Bartkowski signed a five-year deal worth $605,000, and he had to fight to get that amount.

The negotiations with the Falcons hadn’t been proceeding to Barkowski’s liking, and he didn’t want to be a holdout, so he decided to replace his agent with a guy who was Bartkowski’s dorm counselor at Cal – a young man named Leigh Steinberg, who had designs on becoming an entertainment agent, not a sports agent. (Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak also lived down the hall from Bartkowski at Cal.)

Bartkowski was the first client for Steinberg, who eventually became one of the most famous sports agents in the world and reportedly was the model for “Jerry Maguire.”

Steinberg negotiated the $605,000 deal. Those dollars would worth about $3.7 million today, but it’s still a drop in the bucket for today’s top pro quarterbacks.

Nonetheless it was the richest deal ever for an NFL rookie at the time, and Bartkowski showed he was worth it by being named NFL rookie of the year in 1975.

He played 12 seasons in the NFL, was named to two Pro Bowls and finished third in the 1980 MVP voting when he led the Falcons to a 12-4 regular-season record and a playoff berth.

He later became a member of the Falcons Board of Advisors and was named to the College Football Hall of Fame.

He still follows Cal football – “I’ll always be a Cal fan,” he says – but he’s not enamored with the current state of college football with the NIL payments and all the other issues.

“I’ve kind of lost my taste for it,” he said.

Bartkowski followed Mendoza when Mendoza was at Cal, the stepping stone that will presumably help Mendoza become the first person holding a Cal degree be the No. 1 overall NFL draft pick.

Meanwhile, Bartkowski is likely to be fishing in one of the trout-filled streams near his home of the past 10 years, Twin Bridges, Montana.

Fernando Mendoza had a storybook rise from no-name prospect to certain No. 1 pick in the draft.

And he tells @GregBishopSI that he followed Tom Brady’s methods long before it became clear they would join forces with the Raiders https://t.co/yTSWGlsHfB pic.twitter.com/OKe0F9hIoZ
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) April 16, 2026

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