Mike Mayock fondly remembers wandering the various playgrounds of West Philadelphia as a teenager in search of the best competition to test his mettle.
“You’d kind of hear where guys might be running that day and go find them,” Mayock recalled during a phone call late in training camp. “I didn’t care if it was Wiffle ball. Let’s just go find a game.”
It was that same search for competition that led him to leave behind a nearly two-decade run as a television analyst to serve as the general manager of the Raiders in December 2018.
Mayock employed the same passion and work ethic to his media job as he does to his front office gig with the Raiders, particularly his time spent as an NFL draft analyst.
It was a grueling process to prepare for the biggest three days of the year, but as soon as the draft broadcast wrapped, it was time to move on from all of the players he had spent so much time studying.
The son of a football coach wanted more skin in the game, as he describes it.
On Sunday afternoon for three-and-a-half hours, I’m ready to puke. That’s what I missed. The butterflies, the nerves when every snap matters. That’s what’s been the cool thing for me is trying to build something different and special and on Sunday, you live and die by every snap.
Mike Mayock
“When I was at NFL Network, I could prepare 10 months for the draft and feel really good about it afterwards, go out and have a beer and feel like you worked your tail off and did the best you could,” he said. “But there’s no connection to the individual players and the game, it’s just a job well done.”
That’s not the case anymore. Now his meticulous research on every player coming out of college is put to the ultimate test. “You get to see these guys as more than just a commodity,” he said. “You get to see them become fathers, husbands, brothers and men.”
He also has to worry about trades, free agency, managing egos and the salary cap and making sure all those pieces work together when they take the field on game days.
“On Sunday afternoon for three-and-a-half hours, I’m ready to puke,” the 62-year-old Boston College alum said. “That’s what I missed. The butterflies, the nerves when every snap matters. That’s what’s been the cool thing for me is trying to build something different and special and on Sunday, you live and die by every snap.”
A successful transition
It’s a proving ground that sounds nightmarish, but Mayock insists he’s a man living a dream.
“Everybody has a different definition of fun,” he said. “My wife looks at me and just laughs. She’s like, ‘You’ve never had more fun in your life.’ And she’s right. At my age, to have the opportunity to do this, you kind of live and die a little bit every day because it means so much.”
Not that he was unhappy with his prior professional life. After his brief playing career ended, Mayock went into commercial real estate and eventually broke into broadcasting.
He did a little bit of everything in television from sideline reporter in college football and the NCAA basketball tournament to calling games in the Canadian Football League to lead analyst on Notre Dame broadcasts.
It was the kind of versatility that once had him dreaming of being the first person toplay in Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NFL when he was growing up.
Mayock was best known for his NFL draft analysis and had settled into that role, though there was always a sense he wanted to experience what was on the other side of the business. He knew it would have to be the right situation for it to work, however.
Mayock had been inside the facilities of just about every team in his time covering the NFL and the draft and had determined one of the biggest factors in the success or failure of a franchise was whether the coach and general manager were on the same page. He knew it was going to have to be the right fit if he were to move into the front office.
Finding right fit
Mayock found it with the Raiders and head coach Jon Gruden and it didn’t take long to figure it out.
While they had crossed paths many times in their roles as broadcasters, their first meeting about taking the general manager job for the Raiders took place in late 2018 when Gruden was wrapping up the first season of his coaching comeback. 
The group of five or six people at Gruden’s house included owner Mark Davis, but soon only Mayock and Gruden were talking.
“It was the easiest conversation I ever had,” Mayock recalls. “It happened organically. It was just topic to topic to topic about football and on most of them we were aligned. I think the most important thing was just kind of the vision for how to build this franchise.”
In addition to the chemistry, Mayock liked that Gruden had a 10-year contract. It afforded the duo the opportunity to remake the roster according to their vision of how it should be done with the security of enough time to see the process through.
They wanted to focus on building through the draft and augmenting through free agency in areas where they believed they could invest in impact players.
It helped that Gruden had turned assets like Khalil Mack and Amari Cooper into draft capital and salary cap space.
So they were aligned on how to build a team, but Mayock has long said a key part of their shared vision was what type of players they wanted to bring in.
Mayock stressed to his scouting department the importance of evaluating a player and not just his measurables.
“I like smelling the grass,” he said. “I want to be out there. I don’t want to just know the results of the 40 and the vertical jump. I want to see them work out. I want to go to dinner with them. I want to get to know them. I tell my scouts all the time that we can all watch the tape, put the reports in and evaluate, but what makes that kid tick? What’s important to him? The better we do at that, the better overall scouts we will be.
“We want guys with a passion for the game of football,” he said. 
Football first
Anyone who has been at the team’s brand new facility in Henderson before sunrise knows how important football is to the faces of the front office. Mayock typically arrives around 5:30 a.m. He insists he’s never beaten Gruden to work.
The two usually share a coffee around that time to discuss the agenda for the day and whatever big picture issues may be pertinent at the time.
Together, they have turned over almost the entire roster. They believe they are far more talented, stronger, faster and better than when they started. They are certainly younger.
Mayock has confidence in what they are building, but he knows it doesn’t matter until it’s put to the test on the field. As much credit as he got for the success of the rookie class he put together in his first draft, he’s quick to point out his team went 7-9 in his first season as general manager.
So, has the vision he and Gruden had for building the roster started to take shape? 
“The answer to the question is we’re getting more and more of our guys in the building, we’re competing at a higher level, but it remains to be seen whether that translates on the field or not, which is most important,” he said.
“I think we’re slowly seeing what we wanted, which was guys to come in and compete their tails off,” he continued.“We want guys that love to compete, that don’t shrink from competition. That’s probably why you’ve seen some of the guys that we’ve drafted from big schools, used to playing in big games, an opportunity to watch them compete in that type of atmosphere. As Jon and I are sitting here contemplating cutting to a 53-man roster, we kind of take a step back and say it’s a lot harder this year. We’ve got more guys competing. There’s more talent.”
It’s time to put it to the test. But Mayock doesn’t have to seek out that competition like he did when he was a kid.
His work will be graded every week, starting with a road game in Charlotte against the Panthers on Sept. 13.
Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on Twitter.
