I’ve been covering Dallas Cowboys training camp every summer—with a one-year blip in there due to COVID-19—since I went on that beat with the Dallas Morning News in 2007. And maybe it was just me, but I noticed something Friday that I don’t think I’d seen before on the dusty fields of Oxnard, Calif., about an 1 ½ hour drive north of Los Angeles.
No one lingered.
The horn blew. A few guys stayed out to do media scrums. I went off to talk to a couple of guys I had lined up. The staff was back inside quickly. The guys who talked to reporters didn’t hang around long. And that was different. Generally, at this camp, and a lot of others, you’ll get guys staying on the grass after practice for a while to catch up with visitors or family in town. There was none of that.
Again, I might be making too much of it. But it didn’t seem like a coincidence, to me at least, that there was this rush to the exits. It also happened to line up with something Mike McCarthy had relayed a few hours earlier, in his hotel suite, a couple of tennis courts away from those fields.
“This CBA thing is real … I always focus and work with a very high level of urgency because I know how much time I used to have [as a younger coach],” he says, leaning back. “The 11-hour workday is real. We start at 7:30, we go to 6:29. That’s because we’re totally in tune with the opportunity we have with what it takes to prepare. We come out [to California] for a reason. Your family’s out there on vacation for a reason. The weather is phenomenal, the training environment is to maximize this opportunity to get the team ready.
“It really makes you focus. It gives you a chance.”
Here’s something else that’s real—these Cowboys know that the chance they have in 2024, if things go the wrong way, may be the last one for this group, as presently constituted. That is in large part because two of the team’s three best players are in contract years, and one of them isn’t at camp as he seeks a big payday. The third of those guys is eligible now for a second contract for the first time. Adding to it is that McCarthy is going into the final year of his deal, a circumstance NFL teams routinely try to avoid with head coaches.
So where the focus is intense, by design and by circumstance, the sense of urgency is, too.
The Cowboys think this is their time. It feels like, in a lot of ways, it better be.
Accordingly, they’re not wasting a minute.
