Report: Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy will not attend NFL meetings this week

The frenzy of free agency has officially subsided, but that hardly means that there isn’t any NFL business to tend to. There is actual and legitimate business for the National Football League to discuss which is the point of the league meetings that will be taking this week in Florida. It is expected that, as just one example, the league will figure out if they want to change the rules to overtime (again). More than anything, this week will provide microphones for NFL dignitaries to speak into in order to talk about the moves that their franchises have made over the last few weeks.

While Cowboys brass hardly ever passes up the opportunity to speak on the state of the team, there will be no such opportunity for Mike McCarthy this week and it is seemingly of his own choice.

Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy will not attend NFL meetings this week

McCarthy will not be among those in attendance for the NFL’s annual meetings this week in Florida. It is reported that he is instead choosing to focus on the upcoming 2022 NFL Draft instead.

To be clear these are ‘just’ league meetings so they are hardly anything to really scratch your chin at; however, within the report that McCarthy would not attend was the specific nugget from The Dallas Morning News that it is ‘uncommon’ for a head coach to not attend the league’s annual meetings.

We have heard McCarthy speak on two occasions so far this offseason. He spoke at the NFL Combine like every other head coach, but the more notable instance came when he surprisingly joined The Rich Eisen Show and discussed Jerry Jones’ comments about Dan Quinn, his own future, so on and so forth.

We are now about a month away from the 2022 NFL Draft so McCarthy locking in on that process is hardly strange. He has been a bit hands off as far as the draft (in a normal way) throughout his time as the Cowboys head coach and has generally left that process to Will McClay and the team’s scouting department. That does not appear to be the case this year as evidenced by this report, as well as last week’s report that this is the ‘most involved’ he has ever been throughout a pre-draft process.

“I want to see as many prospects as I can,” McCarthy said. “This is the most involved I’ve been with the draft.

“It’s awesome.”

This offseason has hardly been short on storylines for the Cowboys (what else is new) so there will certainly be some who look to read into this. It merely seems to be McCarthy understanding that the draft is the most important part of the offseason for the Cowboys and ensuring that the team handles it as best as they can.

While it is uncommon for head coaches to miss these meetings it has happened before. This is going back a ways, but consider the way it was phrased when New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick missed in 2009.

Head coaches typically attend the annual league meetings in March. This year, Pats coach Bill Belichick won’t be there, according to Tom Curran of NBCSports.com. Per Curran, Belichick has been busy with draft preparation given extensive turnover within the front office and coaching staff. Belichick, the rest of the coaching staff, and director of player personnel Nick Cesario have been on the road for the past two weeks, and they’ll head back to Foxborough on Monday night to continue hammering out a draft board.At least the owners won’t have to listen to any of Belichick’s singing.

Not to say that McCarthy is Belichick, but the draft was highlighted as the reason for the latter missing out. It was also noted that there was extensive turnover with the New England coaching staff at the time which isn’t the case for the Cowboys, but the point is that this has happened before.