The McCarthys had company.
Once each training camp, in his final years as Green Bay Packers coach, Mike McCarthy hosted every player on the 90-man roster, along with coaches, at his home for an athletic carnival called the “McCarthy Olympics.”
Players and coaches divided into teams and competed in various events.
A dunk tank to sink coordinators. A basketball shooting contest in a regulation gym. They lobbed corn-hole bean bags, blasted soccer penalty shots and launched golf balls in a virtual driving range.
“All of us would bus over there,” Packers linebacker Kyler Fackrell said. “He had this incredible compound of a main house. He had a full gymnasium. He’d have people come in and cater food, and he had a huge, couple-hundred-yard-long field. … Inviting everyone over to his house, that just shows he cares about players. It was important for camaraderie.”
Needless to say, 2020 is not an Olympic year.
McCarthy has had to rethink — and rethink again — every element of how he conducts his initial camp as Cowboys coach. By now, his team was supposed to be two weeks into practice. He was supposed to have coached his first preseason game. He is tasked with bringing together a team while simultaneously keeping individuals safely apart.
Little has gone to the original plan.
Seven months ago, when hired, McCarthy envisioned how he would structure a series of minicamps and organized team activities in May and June. All these practices ultimately were canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meetings were held virtually instead.
Five months ago, training camp was set to be held in Oxnard, Calif. He planned to get a jump on that by touring the location in a March visit.
The trip was canceled. Camp is in Frisco instead.
A month ago, he thought there would be 90 players on the field for the first practice. After a series of cuts, there are 80. All five preseason games were canceled. Not until last Sunday could he collectively address veterans in person at a 90-minute team meeting.
There are a number of qualities McCarthy possesses that attracted the Jones family to him during the hiring process. Among them, the Pittsburgh native has a blue-collar backbone. He demands toughness from his teams. He is experienced, having won a Super Bowl in Green Bay.
One trait he has shown in recent months is the ability to be nimble and adapt to change. This includes when determining in July what the Cowboys’ schedule for training camp would be while the NFL and NFL players’ union were still determining operation rules and protocols.
Rookies reported on July 21. All veterans arrived by July 28.
“I think we were just trying to anticipate the way it was going to unfold,” McCarthy said in a Friday conference call. “Was dead wrong on a number of fronts. I’d say we had six or seven plans in the course of the three weeks leading up to it. Just because you want to anticipate. There’s so much of the unknown, particularly with all the adjustments we’ve made to our facility with COVID.
“I can’t say enough about [senior director of football administration] Todd Williams and his staff, the job they’ve done to pull this all together. We spent a lot of time trying to anticipate what the schedule actually was going to be.”
McCarthy did not make any excuses for the Cowboys’ predicament.
It is not unique, he noted. Each team is facing the same situation.
The Cowboys will hold their first full-squad practice of training camp Friday. That will occur in the morning and outdoors at The Star, a setting McCarthy hopes to maintain throughout camp with rare exception. The indoor Ford Center, where team meetings are presently held with players spaced apart, is available as a contingency.
Since there is no preseason, there could be occasional live tackling periods in practice, McCarthy said. These sessions would seem to help coaches evaluate undrafted rookies and other roster bubble players jostling for a job. How often those periods may occur hasn’t yet been determined.
McCarthy said he is looking into non-football group activities to help build team chemistry.
His options are clearly limited during a pandemic. There is little time to spare before the Sept. 13 season opener at the Los Angeles Rams. An Olympics to the scale of what he hosted in Green Bay is simply not feasible, even if he lived in a Dallas house that could support it.
The Cowboys are running an entirely new defense under coordinator Mike Nolan. As many as three of the four starting defensive backs in the base defense could be offseason additions. Offensive coordinator Kellen Moore remains in place, but some of the terminology is different. There is uncertainty about who the starters at left guard and center will be, among other roster questions.
It is time for work. It is time for camp.
Finally, McCarthy is getting started.
“The virtual meetings, I thought, were very productive, very good about the schematic targets we needed to hit with the players,” McCarthy said. “That was very evident once we all got in the same room. Everybody did a good job there. But at the end of day, football is about being together. We’re obviously in a walk-through-type situation, but the energy and vibe in the building has been tremendous.”
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