If OU fans watched Mayfield lead Tampa Bay’s NFC playoff charge recently and said: “That sure looks familiar,” media around here tuned into Mayfield’s Super Bowl Week blitz and said the same thing.

Baker Mayfield dropped by the Dan Patrick Show last Friday as a pitch man for Advance Auto Parts. His one minute of shilling was a small price to pay for the other 14. 

Patrick: “Would you rather be a gunslinger or a game manager?”

Mayfield: “Is there something in the middle?”

Patrick: “We can create something… Like a gameslinger?

Mayfield: “A gameslinger… That sounds like he’s working the corner or something. That sounds like I’m selling. A gameslinger? I’ll take gunslinger.”

If OU fans watched Mayfield lead Tampa Bay’s NFC playoff charge recently and said, “That sure looks familiar,” media around here tuned into Mayfield’s Super Bowl Week blitz and said the same thing. 

Fans miss the quarterbacking. The writers and reporters miss the talking. 

Mayfield told Patrick he’s bashful about jersey swapping because “rejection is one of my biggest fears,” and that throwing an interception is “like a punch to the gut and somebody steals your dog at the same time.” 

Jim Rome asked Mayfield last Thursday about the week in December 2022 he went from being released by Carolina to running the Rams’ offense practically hours later.

“The waiver wire hits at 4 eastern on a Tuesday,” Mayfield said. “Looking at the order of it, I’m like, ‘I think I need to go to L.A.’…  I’m in the airport in Charlotte boarding a plane for LAX and I get a call from Les Snead and Sean McVay (the Rams’ general manager and head coach). 

“I get out there, and two days later… How am I playing in a football game? I have no idea.”

“I showed up for walk-through and I thought Sean was joking,” Mayfield said. “He said, ‘Hey go get some reps in the walk-through.’ ‘What are you talking about?’”

The Rams beat the Raiders the Thursday night after Mayfield’s Monday release. It happened when Mayfield drove the Rams 98 yards and threw a game-winning touchdown pass to Van Jefferson in the closing seconds. 

“This is impossible!” Al Michaels narrated on Prime. 

It was. Mayfield, who said he was in Cabo San Lucas (“a few margaritas… beach and sand”) when he first heard the Panthers release was coming, pretty much confirmed that on Rome’s show.

If OU fans watched Mayfield hit Jefferson in stride and grinned while nodding slowly in reflection, media around here listened to Mayfield provide Rome the backstory and did the same thing. 

The Sooners and Cowboys give us compelling stories annually, mostly because they play compelling games. We are fortunate when we get to weave players’ personalities into those stories, but that’s asking a lot since their coaches tend to be overprotective when it comes to players’ media access.

We never had to worry about weaving personality into anything we wrote or broadcast about Mayfield from 2014-18, from the time he danced during a Russell Athletic Bowl field trip to the time he choked up at the Rose Bowl postgame press conference. 

What he said was as wide a gateway into his personality as what he did. 

Mayfield talked us through his career, from detailing his dorm room experience after showing up at OU basically unannounced to publicly recognizing the errors of his ways in Lawrence, Kansas, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, to throwing at OU for the last time at his NFL Pro Day. 

“I want to be the greatest ever to play the game,” Mayfield said that day.

The long odds of that coming true didn’t matter as much as his belief it was possible and his willingness to say it in front of tape recorders and microphones. He always left his book cracked open.

He still does, as his Super Bowl Week gab-a-thon reinforced.

Mayfield admitted to Matthew Berry’s Fantasy Football show he still plays fantasy football. 

“I have a league with my buddies I grew up with back home, and I have a league with my wife’s family,” he said before revealing he was going to draft himself this year before settling on Josh Allen. 

Mayfield told Rich Eisen he is about to become a first-time dad.

“Gonna have a little girl. I am so screwed,” he said. “I’ll be wrapped around her finger.”

Mayfield went on First Things First and covered ground recognizable from his time at OU — his innate pull on teammates.

“One thing I’ve always thought is interesting is how people are wired, what makes them tick,” he said, “and understanding you’ve got to get to know people on a personal level and truly caring about who they are as people and not just players.”

On CBS, Mayfield said Texas has “gotten soft” over their Horns Down outcry, talked about how tired he got while victory-lapping Ohio Stadium in 2017, and recalled his 2016 duel with Patrick Mahomes at Texas Tech.

Asked for a snapshot of that night in Lubbock, Mayfield said: “About 40,000 people chanting ‘F U Baker.’”

Asked about the tortillas that rained down with the obscenities, Mayfield said: “I picked one up and took a bite of it. That probably wasn’t a good idea at the time. There’s no telling where that thing came from.”  

Six years later, the game remains vivid because of the performances in it, and by the personality of one of the performers. That’s the Baker Mayfield experience, his arm and mouth working in tandem. 

OU fans always focused on the arm. They still do, and relish that it still has some pop. It’s no best-ever, but still able to fashion a great comeback story worthy of Super Bowl Week demand. 

OU writers and reporters focused just as much on Mayfield’s mouth, since that took everybody so many more different directions than his arm. 

It’s pretty cool to see that mouth has some of the old pop, too.