It’s a good thing preseason rosters were bumped from 80 to 90.
Because if they weren’t, the Cowboys would struggle to get a decent practice in.
They were without 18 players, including seven starters and two other regulars, heading into this afternoon’s Blue and White Scrimmage.
“I think injuries are a part of NFL training camps and they’ve always been a part of NFL training camps and I think sometimes when you have injuries at certain positions that becomes that rash and that bad luck thing that we’re talking about the other day,” Cowboys coach Jason Garrett said, via Calvin Watkins of ESPNDallas.com. “Certainly in the interior of the offensive line we’ve had different guys get banged up in different ways and you just have to manage it and make the most of your next best decision as a coaching staff as to how to bring these guys back and who we replace them with.”
The Cowboys had to sign a pair of guards yesterday, and have brought others in for workouts.
That’s made planning for a scrimmage, generally one of the first big tests for young players trying to make the team, a bit more difficult as they try to balance reps.
“It impacts it a great deal,” Garrett said. “It’s a situational day for most of the veteran players and really the essence of this thing in terms of why we call it a Blue-White scrimmage is to get the younger guys a chance to play contact football and tackle to the ground.
“We reassessed it and we’re thinning out some of the periods, we’re taking out a couple of periods, the structure will be the same, we’re just trying to limit some of the reps.”
Situations like this are exactly why coaches winced at the offseason cutbacks. They’re busy trying to install and evaluate, and they just have fewer chances to do so.