No, Mayfield is not in the quarterbacks meeting room evaluating OU’s offensive performance against the Golden Hurricane just days earlier. Far from it. He is alone in the living room of his east-Norman apartment, sitting on a brown couch immediately beneath a 10-foot-long American flag, doing what he enjoys more than almost anything else: dominating a multi-hour session of the video game Halo 3.

Critically acclaimed and one of the most commercially successful first-person shooter games to ever hit the market, Halo 3 is set in the 26th century and features humans battling a collection of alien races in an interstellar war. While the action is intense and the graphics complex, in a nutshell, the object is to shoot your opponents before they shoot you.

Most of the time Mayfield plays online with strangers. He wears a headset, complete with a microphone, so he and his teammates can converse and strategize. The first team to a certain number of "kills" wins.

And Mayfield wins a lot. In fact, he almost never loses. He was so fanatical about Halo 3 as a freshman at Lake Travis High School in Austin, Texas, that playing football for the perennial powerhouse started getting in the way of his video gaming. So much so that between his freshman and sophomore years he said he contemplated cutting back on football so he could devote more time to nabbing cybernetically enhanced creatures on screen.

"He told me at one point he was about to quit football when he was in high school and just play video games; become a professional video gamer," says Jaxon Uhles, a redshirt sophomore fullback for the Sooners who lives with Mayfield in their heavily sports-decorated two-bedroom apartment.  

While Mayfield says that might be a little bit of a stretch, he fully admits that his Halo 3 addiction did reach the “serious” stage. But it’s also what allowed him to excel at the game — then and now.

"When I was little I think I played it way too much," says Mayfield, who was raised in Longhorns territory but grew up rooting for the Sooners. “I’ve played so much that I’m really good with the controls. When I’m thinking about what buttons I have to press, I’m already pressing them.

“Being able to move around and shoot at the same time is something that you're not very good at if you just started to play the game. It's just kind of second nature for me. And I know the map or the course really well, so I can jump around on things and keep shooting and stay alive."

Staying alive is something Mayfield does extremely well. And when he doesn’t, his temper has been known to flare.

Choice words occasionally get issued. Gaming equipment has been busted. Vehemently questioning the integrity and/or intelligence of the CPU is relatively common.

“He likes to go in his bedroom, put on his headphones and play against other people,” says Uhles. “He’s obviously a competitive person, so he really gets after it and he doesn’t like losing at all. He’ll start yelling at the TV if stuff doesn’t go his way. That’s when I shut the door. It gets loud.”

Mayfield corroborates Uhles’ claims.

“I hate to lose,” Mayfield says. “I don’t care who it’s to. Even if it’s online to a 5-year-old from across the country, I can’t stand losing.”

Just how good is Mayfield at Halo 3? Ask him. He’ll tell you.

“One-on-one, I don’t think there’s anybody on campus who can beat me,” he says. “I’m gonna put that out there.”

Keep in mind, more than 25,000 students are enrolled on the OU campus. Surely he can’t be serious.

Start researching, though, and it doesn’t take long to realize he might not just be talking the talk.

“I’ve seen him play a lot of video games,” says Uhles, who has lived with Mayfield for more than a year. “And one-on-one, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him lose in Halo.

“He is very confident in his playing ability. He always challenges random people he meets. He’s an outgoing guy, so he’s always letting people know he’s good at it and challenging them.”

Ryan Spangler is a senior on the OU men’s basketball team and an avid video game player who is even more familiar with Mayfield’s abilities. What’s his assessment?

“He’s legit,” says Spangler. “That’s the word for it. Legit.

“I used to rule Norman in Halo, at least among all my friends,” continues Spangler. “But then Baker came along and he was the best. So I started to jump on teams with him. We can’t be beat on doubles. We’ve never lost as teammates.”

Asked about Mayfield’s assertion that nobody on campus is good enough to beat him, Spangler starts to answer before the question is even finished.

“There’s definitely not. I’m telling you, he’s really good. He’s really good.”
Spangler remembers a particular encounter with a pair of pretty good — and pretty cocky — opponents in a doubles game with Mayfield after he first arrived in Norman following his transfer from Texas Tech at the beginning of the 2014 spring semester. Because Mayfield had just gotten a new Xbox console, the personal ranking emblems doled out by the game listed the two Sooners as beginners. The opposing players talked trash before the action began, only to quickly discover something was evidently awry with the player-rating system.

“Baker was at his apartment and I was at mine,” says Spangler, “and we were both on our headsets. You can’t hear your opponents when the game starts, just before it begins and after it ends. So once it starts he tells me to just hide out and let him go one-on-two against them. He dominated them and we won pretty easily. They hopped off pretty quickly afterward.”