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Mike McCarthy gives Groundhog Day analogy for being agency wallflowers

Mike McCarthy gives Groundhog Day analogy for being agency wallflowers

A loyal Twitter follower asked me a few days prior to free agency a question about his beloved Green Bay Packers, something along the lines of: “Are my Packers finally going to do something in free agency?” (I for some reason can’t find the original tweet, perhaps because my answer might have led him to infer how silly the question sounded to me and delete the son of a gun.)

It was short and sweet:

“No.”

Mind you, this was one year after the Packers had done the unthinkable: Sign an aged Julius Peppers to a bloated three-year contract (!) worth beaucoup dollars. It got Packers fans all lathered up. Perhaps GM Ted Thompson had turned over a new leaf?

Negative. Consider the Peppers signing to be the Packers equivalent of Halley’s Comet. Hope you enjoyed it when it came through.

Packers head coach Mike McCarthy pretty much confirmed this after his team has signed a par-for-the-course zero outside free agents since the start of the open derby in early March. Speaking with MMQB, McCarthy offered a cheeky response — as cheeky as MM gets, anyway — to Peter King’s rhetorical free-agency lob.

“We obviously have a philosophy,” McCarthy said. “It’s kind of like Groundhog Day. I feel like I answer this every year, so I’ll try to be creative and answer it differently this year. But it’s just the way we operate. We do the evaluations. We just stick to our plan. Our number one priority always has been to sign our own free agents. We go into every offseason—if we have 10 conversations, nine-and-a-half of them are about our own guys.”

Wish I’d have thought of this when I was asked on Twitter. Mike likely could take my job tomorrow if he didn’t have one of the Super Bowl favorites on his hands to coach. And that’s the bigger point: The Packers do it the right way. Free agency isn’t a complete and utter evil, but it’s the grand unifying everything-in-moderation theory (e.g. too much of anything can kill you: water, milk, nutmeg, poppy seeds, jogging, sleeping, even grain alcohol) of the NFL.

Want to blow your friends’ minds at the bar? Throw them this nugget: Peppers is the only Packer on their current roster who has played an NFL regular-season game on another team’s roster. Seriously. Look it up.

Mind. Blown.

When that factoid floated across Twitter a few weeks ago, I had my requisite Twitter suspicion, but I sat there and looked up every player I knew wasn’t drafted by Thompson and Co., and darn it if it wasn’t true.

Yes, the Packers mine other teams’ rosters for talent, just as every other team does. But they tend to go for younger, less-proven and cheaper options to do so, not as smitten by the shiny-object free agents as the teams that tend to finish in last place every season are.

They build from within, and it’s their self-improvement that tends to keep them relevant. If Eddie Lacy is good and effective getting around 250 carries a season, then why mess with a good thing? And if they see what they like in a small sample size with the pistol formation? Sure, let’s try more of it.

If cornerbacks Tramon Williams and Davon House leave in free agency, there’s Micah Hyde and Casey Hayward and three young, untested players left in reserve. Draft for talent and squirrel it away when willy-nilly teams woo your starters away with foolish free-agent bucks. There’s more where that came from.

Maybe Groundhog Day isn’t so bad after all?

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!