Before Mike Mayock became the G.M. of the Raiders, he had served for years as one of NFL Network\u2019s primary voices in and around the NFL draft. Mayock recently shared past frustrations regarding the manner in which NFL Network staffed other aspects of its draft coverage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there are too many guys that just get used to \u2014 because they were such good players \u2014 having people give them things,\u201d Mayock said on The Ross Tucker Football Podcast, via Sam Neumann of Awful Announcing. \u201cAnd it was one of my really sore points at NFL Network. It used to drive me crazy when they\u2019d bring in a guy for the draft that was a big-name guy, that was going to talk about his position, and couldn\u2019t tell me three names in the draft<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I would be like, \u2018What are we doing? Like, what\u2019s important here?\u2019 And the producers and all the people would be like, \u2018He brings credibility.\u2019 And I would be like, \u2018What about Daniel Jeremiah, Charles Davis, and me doing all the grinding of the tape? Isn\u2019t that all the credibility we need?\u2019 And the answer was pretty much, \u2018No, we need these names.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not an uncommon approach. Some networks prioritize names over knowledge, sizzle over substance. They believe that having played the game, for however long or short of a career, leads to a perception of inherent expertise that supersedes years if not decades of study.<\/p>\n Why does it happen? There are several reasons for it. One is that the bar for educating a broad audience is low. If the information that is conveyed in basic, digestible sound bites can be communicated by someone with a bigger name, that\u2019s better for the network. <\/p>\n Could someone else who didn\u2019t play know more? Sure. But there usually isn\u2019t enough real estate for the audience to listen to a big-name player and conclude, \u201cThis guy is clueless.\u201d<\/p>\n Basically, the guys who made it on the field can usually fake it \u2018til they make it with a microphone. And the presence of a big name also makes it easier to fulfill the overriding goal of leveraging those big names into bigger advertising revenues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Mike Mayock became the G.M. of the Raiders, he had served for years as one of NFL…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":719775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-719774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}