If Mike Mayock was only able to select players from two schools, he knows which two he would pick.

After being on hand to watch the latest College Football Playoff National Championship Game, Mayock obviously came away impressed with what he saw from both Alabama and Clemson in the game, as the Raiders used three of their first four selections in the 2019 NFL Draft on players from the game in addition to the fifth round selection of Hunter Renfrow.

It’s either a genius strategy or a seriously flawed one, we won’t know the answer for a few years, but it’s interesting that Mayock pretty much admitted how impressed he came away with the players on Alabama and Clemson after watching the two teams face off in Santa Clara back in early January. Mayock was on hand to watch the game one week after landing the general manager job with the Raiders and admits he fell in love with these rosters.

“I felt it on the field before the game, these were the two best college programs in the country and have been for several years now,” Mayock said to Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated’s the MMQB. “And when you walk around on the field before the game and watch these guys warm up, and you do your body types, you’re taking notes—they look like two NFL teams. I said it to somebody, I don’t remember who, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Man, if you just draft from these two teams, you’re gonna do well, forget the rest of the country.’

“I didn’t consciously set out to make that happen. But we got more and more impressed with these Clemson kids, as we met them, as people. We loved the Alabama tailback. And it worked out pretty well from our perspective.”

Oakland made the first shocking pick of the 2019 NFL Draft by taking Clelin Ferrell at No. 4, which was later followed by taking Joshua Jacobs at No. 24 and Trayvon Mullen at No. 40. As noted above, the Raiders then rounded out their selections from the CFP title game by taking Renfrow later in the draft.

It would appear Mayock is admitting he locked in on these players one week into his job, which could be troubling for Raider fans. However, if there are two teams to latch on to during the pre-draft process, you can’t pick any better than Alabama and Clemson at the moment.