Dallas Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy’s focus on the 2022 NFL Draft might be a job saver
Only two of the 32 coaches did not attend NFL Annual Meetings, which began Sunday and concluded on Tuesday, The Breakers Hotel in South Florida.
Word out of Detroit was that Lions coach Dan Campbell had a doctor’s note as he was sick.
It can be said that Dallas Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy stayed away to fix his ailing football team and salvage his career.
Heading into what is a crucial third year of his tenure in Dallas, McCarthy skipped the NFL Meetings, uncommon for coaches barring illness, to focus on the 2022 NFL Draft.
It’s a process that has taken on a greater importance between last season’s frustrating home loss in the wild-card round and an urgent need to improve without the benefit of having big-time free agents come in to join the club.
It’s all part of a Cowboys business model that predates McCarthy, but it’s one that could have him on the hot seat by the end of 2022 if the Cowboys don’t take a legitimate step toward reaching the Super Bowl for the first time since 1995.
For the record, the Cowboys and McCarthy explained his absence from the NFL Meetings to focus on the draft as a better use of his time and resources with him attending more pro days scouting prospects and the meeting agenda in Palm Beach being a short one.
The NFL Meetings were actually scheduled to conclude on Wednesday, but ended a day early.
“Things are better served to be here, just with the volume of the activity on the road this year,” McCarthy said via video conference on Tuesday morning. “This is probably going to be one of the biggest draft classes we’ve seen in some time, that’s a part of my thinking on staying back.”
Said team vice president Stephen Jones: “He felt like that was the best use of his time. We had a very small agenda from a competition standpoint. I am very involved on the committee. I keep him very abreast. We didn’t have a major problem with him choosing to stay back and work with coaches and do some draft work.”
McCarthy has already attended pro days at Penn State, Ole Miss and Georgia. He was scheduled to go to North Carolina on Monday but canceled the trip and stayed back and did some red zone work with the coaches.
He is flying out Tuesday night to attend the Alabama pro day on Wednesday with the scouts and defensive coordinator Dan Quinn.
The Cowboys begin their official draft meetings on Monday with McCarthy having daily consultations with the coaches and staff all the way up until the Day 1 of the NFL Draft, which begins on April 28.
The Cowboys have nine picks this year and an intensified focus has become even more of a necessity because the draft is deeper than in recent years due to the number of players who stayed in college an extra year due to COVID-19.
A normal year has roughly 150-160 players with draftable grades, but this year’s class has around 220 such players according to McCarthy.
“There’s just a volume,” McCarthy said. “Obviously, I think what you’re seeing is the effects of the pandemic. Prospects going back for another year. This is just an extremely large class. This year with the volume of everything, we really just put all hands on deck just to make sure we have the Pro Days covered. The coaches have traveled a lot more this year than last year.”
Jones said it’s important to the Cowboys for McCarthy to be heavily involved in the draft process. He has been around great football players in his career, especially during his time in Green Bay, and it was one of the benefits the Cowboys hoped to take advantage of when they hired before the 2020 season.
But the he said the Cowboys have always included the head coaches and coordinators in the draft process and they have been dialed in even more under vice president of player personnel Will McClay
“One of Will’s strong suits is getting a vision of what Mike and [offensive coordinator] Kellen [Moore] want to do on offense and what Dan wants to do on defense,” Jones said. “They got a vision for how we want to play football. We have always involved coaches in the evaluation process.”
McCarthy said his involvement in the draft process is on par with where it was in his first two seasons with the Cowboys, although the landscape is different because of the virtual aspects of the process during the pandemic since the spring of 2020.
But his role is much greater than it was during his 13 years with the Packers or anywhere else he worked since breaking into the NFL in 1994.
“The job description and the interaction between coaching and personnel here at the Dallas Cowboys is clearly higher,” McCarthy said. “As coaches, we love that. I think Will and the personnel staff do an outstanding job, and I think the collaboration is a real strength of our operation. I enjoy it. I think any coach in this league would enjoy that process, how the personnel department and the coaching department are connected.”
It’s a process that must yield immediate results or there will be a new Cowboys coach attending the NFL Meetings in 2023.
This story was originally published March 29, 2022 at 4:20 PM.
