Dallas Cowboys coach Jason Garrett doesn’t view player-organized conditioning test as act of defiance
By Rainer Sabin
rsabin@dallasnews.com
3:00 pm on July 24, 2014 |
OXNARD, Calif. — In the universe the Cowboys inhabit, where every quote is parsed and each bit of news is reported, it’s no surprise the subject of conditioning tests remains a hot one.
On Tuesday, head coach Jason Garrett explained why the Cowboys were not holding them, calling the fitness exams, when administered on the eve of training camp, a “recipe for disaster.”
In the case of left guard Ron Leary, he may not have been exaggerating. Leary was one of approximately 75 players who elected to do conditioning tests at Valley Ranch on Monday without the coaches’ supervision even after Garrett expressed reservations to the team about holding them before it disbanded following the June minicamp. During one of the runs Monday, Leary suffered a slight hamstring strain and now is on the active/physically unable to perform list.
Garrett didn’t view the decision of the players to hold the conditioning test on their own as an act of defiance even though it seemed to go against his plans, which included a team run Tuesday.
“A lot of our players live in Dallas,” Garrett said. “They lift together. They run together. They throw together. I think it was probably just an extension of that. Guys are trying to get ready to play football. You see it around the league. Sometimes, these kinds of things happen.”
Garrett said he expects Leary to return to the field Tuesday.
“You always want to be out here when [camp] starts,” Leary said. “But it’s something minor.”
Still, this entire episode has created a bit of a kerfuffle that Garrett has spent time trying to downplay.
“What we wanted to do as an organization is not have a conditioning test the day before we go out to practice football,” he said. “I expressed that to the players on our team and that’s how we operated. Whatever guys do to get to this point is their decision to get there. We laid a great foundation in the offseason to get our team ready. And I feel like guys are ready to go.
Except Ron Leary.