Kids grow up in Covington, Ky., shooting a basketball and Michael Mayer was no different, pretending he was John Wall in his driveway.
Mayer, the Raiders’ second-round draft pick in April, had some game and planned to play basketball in college one day. Until he got a present after the eighth grade.
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“I got a bench press in my basement, started lifting … and man, I lost my jump shot,” Mayer said at the NFL Scouting Combine. “I couldn’t shoot worth anything, so I played football my freshman year and I kind of just took off from there. Got a little bit bigger, got stronger, got faster, things like that.”
Mayer didn’t know it at the time, but his family had worked behind the scenes to give him a push toward football.
Ted Edgington was the freshman coach at Covington Catholic High and was also an old high school friend of Mayer’s uncle.
“Michael’s dad called me and said I think his sport is football, not basketball — ‘See if you can talk him into playing it,'” Edgington said in a phone interview. “So I called Michael and asked if he would just try football and if he didn’t like it, he could quit. I think I told him to play all the sports he can because the four years (of high school) will go by quickly and he might as well try everything.”
Once he walked on the football field, Mayer never came off it, playing defensive end and tight end. The freshman team went 9-0.
“He dominated at the freshman level but I still wasn’t sure if he was going to come out as a sophomore,” Covington Catholic varsity coach Eddie Eviston said in a phone interview. “That’s when AJ went to work.”
AJ is Mayer’s brother, two years older and then the quarterback at Covington.
“He told Michael, ‘Man, it sure would be cool if we could play one year together,'” Eviston said. “Michael agreed, started right away and did well against some pretty good teams. He realized that he was pretty good at this and he got the itch.”
Mayer went on to become the state of Kentucky’s Mr. Football and then went to Notre Dame to follow in a long line of NFL tight ends. College teammates called him “Baby Gronk” — the 6-foot-5, 249-pound Mayer wears No. 87 and is built like a tank — but Mayer has always been more partial to the Chiefs’ Travis Kelce than the retired Patriots star Rob Gronkowski. Yeah, Kelce also wears No. 87.
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“The way he runs his routes, the way he does his thing, man, it’s like no other,” Mayer said of Kelce. “He’s expanding the tight end game greatly. And so I’ve got to go with Trav. Got to meet him last summer. Great guy. And just to watch film on him, see how he plays his game, he’s tremendous at the tight end position and he’s doing amazing things for the tight end position, too.”
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The Raiders will take either comparison. They needed to replace Darren Waller and general manager Dave Ziegler said that Mayer was the 15th-rated player on their draft board, and he moved quickly to trade up to No. 35 when Mayer was still available. The Raiders had taken pass rusher Tyree Wilson with their No. 7 pick.
“We thought he would go in the first round,” Ziegler told SiriusXM NFL Radio recently. “He can get open from a lot of different alignments, and he got open against a lot of different players, whether it was a corner, safety or linebacker. He has a special trait where he has some short-area quickness at the top of the route and some savvy as to how he sets up his route for a young player. It allows him to get open often. He was often the best offensive player on the field, no matter who they were playing.”
Mayer didn’t know what he was doing when he put on football pads for the first time. But he could run, catch and hit people.
“He came out and excelled right off the bat,” Edgington said. “He didn’t know the techniques but he had a high motor and was a leader on the field. He was a natural athlete and he was too good to take off the field.”
Other players, though, were being helped off the field.
“He hit a couple of kids too hard at practice,” Edgington said, “and you’re like, “Hey, whoa! I only have 33 kids, you can’t be knocking them out.'”
The next few years, Mayer broke one teammate’s ribs and gave another one a concussion, and Eviston had to pull him aside again his senior year.
“He loved hitting, and he was such a tremendous practice player,” Eviston said. “He practiced like he played on Friday nights and he loved tackling. I had to pull him in and he got a little upset with me. But we had to save our other kids to get through the year. I had to tell him to chill.”
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Recruiters loved that mentality, and Eviston didn’t know whether Mayer was going to end up playing offense or defense in college.
“There was definitely a lot of doubt,” he said. “I always talked with him through that process, especially his junior year, with how he wanted me to approach college coaches when they call me about you. They are calling either way and, for our program, he was actually more valuable on defense. We tried not to take him off the field at all defensively and we tried to get him some breaks here and there offensively. Until his senior year. He never came off the field his senior year.”
Eviston eventually moved Mayer from defensive end to middle linebacker his junior season, when it became clear that opposing teams’ main strategy was to run the other way from wherever Mayer was lined up.
“He did a good job,” Eviston said. “It wasn’t a natural position for him and I don’t know if he read linemen all that great, but it didn’t matter. He could take one false step and be able to redirect, shed and overpower people. He was a man amongst boys his last two years.”
Mayer caught 50 passes for 970 yards and 15 touchdowns his senior season. He also rushed 10 times for 64 yards and two touchdowns. He was busy on defense, too, recording 99 tackles, 7 1/2 tackles for a loss, 1 1/2 sacks, five forced fumbles and four interceptions — one of which he returned for a touchdown. Covington went undefeated that year and Mayer finished his three years on varsity with a 44-1 record.
“Eddie and his staff did such a great job of taking that raw talent and making it fun for him and pushing him,” Edgington said.
Edgington, by the way, is a lifelong Raiders fan who has attended games in their previous homes of Los Angeles and Oakland.
“People here have always given me a hard time about that,” he said, laughing. “And now, everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon. Luckily, they haven’t been very good so there is plenty of room.”
The “Baby Gronk” thing was obvious in high school as well.
“We saw it every day in practice,” Eviston said. “Kids were bouncing off of him and he is making circus catches. Wearing that number helped, and he had all of those similarities, and Gronkowski was the man at that time.”
That wasn’t enough and Mayer has worked hard on his route running. He plans to keep getting open at the next level as well.
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“Red zone, third down, I can really go up and get that ball, I can make contested catches and I can really route people up,” Mayer said at the combine. “I have that connection with the quarterback also. He knows where I’m going to be. He knows how I’m going to run my route, and I know where that quarterback is going to be putting that ball.”
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Mayer was clearly the No. 1 option for Notre Dame last season. He broke his own school record for tight ends with nine touchdowns to go along with 67 catches for 809 yards and was named an All-American.
Notre Dame is an NFL tight end factory, and Mayer became the 11th straight starting tight end from the school to be drafted, dating back to Anthony Fasano in 2006. Twenty-six Notre Dame tight ends have been drafted, including Raiders’ Hall of Famer Dave Casper, Giants great Mark Bavaro, as well as Kyle Rudolph and current NFL players Cole Kmet, Durham Smythe, Tommy Tremble and Alize Mack.
Mayer knew what he had to work on to join that list.
“The receiving part of it has always kind of been there for me, but I really had to kind of dig deep for that blocking and it went really, really well this past season,” Mayer said the night he was drafted. “Me and my tight ends coach worked on it a lot, and it improved greatly. It’s only going to keep getting better. So, that’s something I pride myself on a lot and I think being able to do both of those things is very, very important for a tight end. And I’m going to keep working at both of them and keep trying to excel at both of them.”
Mayer said no detail was too small when it came to being coached by Parker.
Whether it was catching the ball …
“‘Look, you need to go two more steps … you can’t cut that short. If you cut that short, the defender’s going to pick it. He’s going to get a hand on it,’” Mayer said.
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Or blocking …
“‘Hands inside, get your hips into them, like that,’” Mayer said. “I think that’s one of the things Coach Parker really helped me with is the details in my technique, my steps, things like that.”
Mayer also got a lot out of attending Tight End University, a three-day summer program started by George Kittle, Kelce and Greg Olsen to help NFL tight ends and some select college players connect and get better at their craft. He is excited about all the possibilities in trying to be a top player like Kittle and Kelce.
“I think I can do anything the team asked me to do,” Mayer said. “I can be in the backfield, and I can block. I can be a fullback and block. I can be at the end, I can be out by the numbers, I can be in the slot and run routes. I can do it all, man. And that’s really how I feel.”
Mayer was one of the hardest workers at Covington Catholic and Notre Dame, and that led to special seasons when combined with his athletic ability and tenacity. Part of the reason is because he never stopped having fun. That’s something that Mayer picked up as a kid, back when he lost his jump shot.
“I remember being a Bengals fan, and I remember Ochocinco and T.J. Houshmandzadeh and boys like that just going out there and doing their thing and having fun playing football,” Mayer said. “And I just remember thinking like, they look like they’re having fun out there, man. And that’s what I’m gonna do.
“I’m going to try to go out there, play the best football I can, and have some fun doing it.”
(Top photo: Michael Owens / Getty Images)
