When Hunter Renfrow picked up his phone three years ago, answered a call from former Raiders head coach Jon Gruden and former Raiders general manager Mike Mayock, and found out he had been selected by the Raiders in the fifth round of the 2019 NFL Draft, the former Clemson star receiver was certainly appreciative that the franchise took a chance on him.
“That was a dream come true,” Renfrow said during a recent interview with former Clemson running back Darien Rencher on The Players Club Podcast. “I had always dreamed of getting drafted to a team and playing in the NFL. So, when Coach Gruden called me and Mike Mayock called me, I was very thankful and very excited.”
Ironically though, during the pre-draft process, the Raiders were the team that Renfrow pegged as the one he least wanted to play for.
With the Raiders still in Oakland at the time before moving to Las Vegas ahead of the 2020 season, Renfrow didn’t want to move all the way across the country and live so far from home in Oakland, nor was he particularly excited about the prospect of playing in a wild place like Las Vegas.
Renfrow told Rencher a funny story about how he and his wife, Camilla, agreed before the 2019 draft that if he didn’t get picked and had to sign a free-agent deal after it, the Raiders were the No. 1 team on their list of teams they didn’t want him to sign with.
“If you’re a later-round guy or free-agent guy – which I didn’t know if I was going to be a fourth-rounder or a fifth-rounder or a sixth-rounder or a seventh-rounder or not drafted – you really don’t know,” Renfrow said. “You don’t really have an idea. Some teams like you, but you’re not certain what’s going to happen. So, I talked to my agent a little bit about if I’m not drafted and I’m a free agent, where are the places that I want to go, where are the places that me and Camilla would feel good about going and signing a free-agent contract and hoping to make the team? So, I remember going through a list of where I wanted to go, and then I made a list of where do I not want to go?
“And I remember me and Camilla came to the consensus that the Raiders were the number one team we did not want to go to, which is funny. Because they were in Oakland for one year, and up until college, I thought Oakland was in like Florida. I had no idea where Oakland was. My geography’s awful, and it’s so far away from home when I found out it was in California. Taxes… and I was like, I don’t want to be there and then go all the way across the country from my family and then we’re going to Vegas in a year – that’s Sin City, that’s the Strip, that’s craziness. So, that’s the number one place we did not want to go.”
It’s safe to say playing for the Raiders has worked out very well for Renfrow, who has racked up 208 receptions for 2,299 yards and 15 touchdowns in three seasons since being chosen in the fifth round (149th overall pick) of the 2019 draft.
The Clemson legend is coming off a career year with the Raiders in 2021, when he set career highs with 103 catches for 1,038 yards and nine touchdowns en route to earning his first career Pro Bowl nod.
Ultimately, Renfrow is glad he got that fateful call from the Raiders three years ago and is in the situation he’s in now.
“I couldn’t be more thankful we ended up here,” he said, “because there’s so many good people.”
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