It hasn’t been an entirely healthy offseason for Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
Jones had surgery last week to repair a damaged retina in his left eye. The recovery from that surgery did not force Jones to skip the team’s rookie minicamp, so he was able to share his thoughts about the need to keep this year’s crop of rookies healthier than last year’s new arrivals in Dallas. Only two of the seven players drafted in 2012 were able to play in all 16 games last year.
Jones said that the team is monitoring the rookies’ activities during practice more closely than they did last year, including things like stretching in hopes of eliminating some of the muscle strains and pulls that sidelined players in 2012.
“We have tried to keep that in mind as we take these guys through practice,” Jones said, via Clarence Hill of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “We are trying to make sure we are doing the things as best we can to not have some of the pulls we had last year.”
The Cowboys are expecting each of their first six picks to contribute a fair amount during the 2013 season so there’s little need to explain why they would want to see the newcomers anywhere but the trainer’s room. You can only protect yourself against injury so much in football and there’s never going to be a way to eliminate the random broken bone, but that’s hardly reason enough to avoid proactive measures that could limit the other kinds of injuries that helped sink the Cowboys last year.