After Jimmy Garoppolo took his first of three knees last Sunday to clinch the San Francisco 49ers’ NFC championship game win over the Green Bay Packers, Fox cameras cut to a jubilant 49ers sideline and caught a familiar face wearing a not-so-familiar grin: Former Detroit Lions general manager Martin Mayhew.

Wearing a gray suit and a wool 49ers cap on his head, Mayhew shook hands with cornerback Richard Sherman and back-slapped head coach Kyle Shanahan, as players and staff members celebrated wildly around him.

“It was pretty amazing,” Mayhew told the Free Press in a 30-minute phone interview this week. “I went to the Super Bowl my fourth year in the league and probably like a lot of people that go early, you think you’re going to be back. So I’m thinking like at least every three or four years I should be going. And this is 28 years later, so it’s been a long road to get back, but I’m excited about where we are and the opportunity that’s in front of us.”

The 49ers head to Miami this week with an opportunity to win their sixth Super Bowl and first in the 25 years when they play the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs.

Mayhew, the 49ers' vice president of player personnel, will be there, too, with a chance to win his second ring – his first as an executive – and perhaps change the narrative about a front-office career that time has smiled more kindly upon.

Fired midway through the 2015 season after 6½ years as Lions GM, Mayhew helped raise the organization from subterranean depths no NFL team had seen before.

The Lions had a losing record during his tenure and failed to win a playoff game. Their drought in that second category is now a humbling 28 years.

But they made the playoffs three years after going 0-16, and twice in Mayhew’s six full seasons, and had arguably the best offensive and separately defensive seasons in modern franchise history under his watch.

None of that is to be celebrated like an NFC championship game win. Mayhew will be the first to admit that, and say his Lions teams needed to do more.

But 11 years after he took over for Matt Millen, with a handful of his former draft picks (Laken Tomlinson, Kyle Van Noy, Riley Reiff, Quandre Diggs, Larry Warford) playing key roles on playoff teams, it’s time to admit he was a better GM than anyone has given him credit for.

A Donald do-over

The disdain for Mayhew’s time in Detroit can be traced to the night of May 8, 2014, when he made the regrettable decision to draft Eric Ebron over Aaron Donald.

“Everybody sort of whittles down, me being seven years I was there, into one draft pick,” Mayhew said. “Like, ‘Oh my God, he didn’t take Aaron Donald so he was awful.’ And that’s fair. Everybody has their own narrative and I can’t tell people how to judge the time that I was there.”

Mayhew declined to explain why he passed on Donald, a two-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year who’s on track to make the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

But through previous reporting, it’s known there was a big discrepancy between the grades Lions scouts and coaches gave Donald coming out of Pittsburgh.

An undersized interior defensive lineman at 6 feet 1 and 285 pounds, Donald did not fit the Lions’ profile for a defensive tackle. The Lions had success with big, physical interior linemen like Ndamukong Suh and Nick Fairley, both of whom were heading into their free-agent year, and given the disconnect between coaches and scouts, Mayhew made what appeared at the time to be the disciplined decision to pass.

Six years later, Mayhew acknowledges that was a mistake.

“I wish I would have taken Aaron Donald,” he said. “That’s no knock on Ebron. I wish I would have taken him. It’s not a decision that’s made in a vacuum. We talked about a lot of different scenarios, different situations. Man, I wish I had taken him.”

Taking Donald at No. 10 wasn’t the no-brainer it seems like today. Donald, after all, lasted three more picks, and the team that took him, the St. Louis Rams, used its first first-round pick on one of the draft’s biggest busts, offensive tackle Greg Robinson.

But along with Donald, the Lions passed on Odell Beckham Jr., Kyle Fuller, Taylor Lewan and Zack Martin, all of whom went in the ensuing six picks.

“It’s like anything else in this game,” Mayhew said. “If you’re the defensive coordinator and you call a blitz at the wrong time and you give that touchdown up and lose the game, you can’t get that back. You don’t get a do-over. You get one shot. If you’re the corner and you get beat for the winning touchdown, you got to live with that (and learn from it). If you’re the quarterback and you throw a pick-six in the fourth quarter with an opportunity to win it, you got to live with that.

“So I don’t have any – I don’t look back it like I want to get a do-over. I understand the way the league is and I’ve been in it pretty much my whole adult life. So I appreciate the time I was there, and I wish we could have done better for the city and for the ownership and for the players that we had there.”

'Really close'

In 2011, the Lions scored a franchise record 474 points on their way to 10 wins and a wildcard berth. Matthew Stafford, Mayhew’s first ever draft pick as GM, set franchise records in nearly every passing category, and Calvin Johnson started the best three-year stretch for a receiver in NFL history (later to be topped by Antonio Brown).

In 2014, led by one of the NFL's best defenses, the Lions went 11-5 and came a fourth-quarter collapse — amplified by a picked-up penalty flag — away from winning a playoff game.

“The way people talk about Aaron Donald, maybe we were one pick away,” Mayhew said. “If we’d have had him, we’d probably beat Dallas in the playoff game. So we came pretty close, but we weren’t able to get over that hump.”

Things, of course, went south after that 2014 collapse.

Suh left in free agency a few months later, when the Lions weren’t able to use the franchise tag on him after mismanaging his rookie contract. The Lions, without their tone-setter, came swaggerlessly out of the gate in 2015, losing seven of their first eight games. And Mayhew and team president Tom Lewand, lacking the cushion a playoff win over the Cowboys would have provided, were fired at midseason.

“It would have been awesome to get a playoff win,” Mayhew said. “Didn’t make that happen, but I feel like we actually came close to turning that thing around. Really close. If we had Suh under contract one more year maybe we do turn it around.”

Asked how close they were and to what, Mayhew said, “I’m not going to speculate on that.”

Another chance?

In the years since he left Detroit, Mayhew has been linked to a number of high-profile front-office jobs.

He interviewed for the Tennessee Titans general manager job that went to Jon Robinson, a director of pro scouting role with the Indianapolis Colts, and a vice president position with the Cleveland Browns that he learned quickly had no decision-making authority, before landing an executive position with the New York Giants in 2016.

In 2017, Mayhew joined general manager John Lynch, his close friend from his playing days, in San Francisco’s front office, and in the past three years he has interviewed for GM jobs with the Carolina Panthers and Houston Texans.

While NFL teams have historically been reluctant to give GMs a second chance running a team, that has started to change in recent seasons with the likes of John Dorsey and Dave Gettleman, and in difference scenarios Howie Roseman and Marty Hurney, being repeat GMs.

The Donald pick aside, Mayhew’s track record shows he’s deserving of another shot.

Stafford, the No. 1 pick in 2009, Suh, who went No. 2 a year later in 2010, and three-time Pro Bowl cornerback Darius Slay, a second-rounder in 2013, are some of Mayhew’s best draft choices, while players like Glover Quin, Golden Tate and Matt Prater were hits in free agency.

Like all GMs, Mayhew had his share of misses. The Titus Young pick was a gamble not worth taking, and he never could build a formidable running game despite spending high picks on Jahvid Best and Mikel Leshoure. But players like Van Noy, Tomlinson and Ebron, who were ushered out the door in Detroit, have found success elsewhere, with Ebron making the Pro Bowl a season ago.

Most importantly, Mayhew said he has learned from his experience and is better off for it.

His time in New York was “enlightening.”

“The way that they ran their draft, the way they did their draft meetings, the way they were organized was something new,” he said.

And in San Francisco, where he started as an adviser to Lynch with pro and college scouting responsibilities, he has adapted to the New England Patriots-style grading system and discovered ways to be more collaborative.

“We benefit here from watching a lot of tape together, and everybody has blind spots but when you watch stuff together and you watch enough guys together, I think you minimize some mistakes that way,” Mayhew said. “I think I’d be a lot more methodical in the draft process (in my next job). For sure. We took some shots, mid, late rounds on some guys, height-weight-speed guys, things like that. I think I’d be a lot more focused on just getting the most solid, productive guy that I knew could come in and contribute in some way in those situations.”

Whether Mayhew gets another shot, only time will tell. He’s not dwelling on that possibility, but is ready if it happens. And the 49ers being one win away from another championship can only help his cause.

“That’s something I’ll think about later,” Mayhew said. “Right now, I’m happy with the job I have and people I work with, and I’m getting ready to go to Miami and play the Super Bowl.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Read more on the Detroit Lions and sign up for our Lions newsletter.