FRISCO, Texas — The Dallas Cowboys practiced indoors Wednesday, and coach Brian Schottenheimer said the club’s sports science staff is making those calls.
Dallas works inside at Ford Center at The Star, the 12,000-seat, 510,000-square-foot venue that opened in 2016 at 9 Cowboys Way. The building sits on the club’s 91-acre Frisco campus and doubles as the home field for Frisco ISD high school football.
“I mean, just, you know, AI has changed everything. Sports science has changed everything,” Schottenheimer said. “We’ve got a unique situation when you look at these next five weeks really when you factor in, you know, get home at 5 a.m. and the trip to Rio, which is like a short week kind of for us. And the league did us a favor by getting us to go to Houston and then come home on Thursday. That was cool. And so we’re just trying to do what we can to avoid the heat. We don’t play in the heat. So right now we’re just trying to do our best to get on the grass for certain things and then be inside for certain things. But we’re really just, the sports science team is driving a lot of those decisions. And right now we just feel we can get better work done inside.”
The stretch he described starts Sunday night in East Rutherford. Dallas then hosts the Washington Commanders on Sept. 20 at 3:25 p.m. CT and flies to Rio de Janeiro for a Sept. 27 kickoff. Three games fall inside 12 days.
Brian Schottenheimer On The Cowboys Sports Science Staff
Dallas held training camp at River Ridge Playing Fields in Oxnard, California, and worked joint practices with the Los Angeles Rams on Aug. 11 and with the New Orleans Saints ahead of the preseason finale at AT&T Stadium. On Sept. 1, the Cowboys practiced early specifically to put players in the heat and closed the session with conditioning. Dallas has held two padded practices this week.
The staff behind those decisions is large enough that Schottenheimer would not name its members, and he said the players have bought into the recovery side of it.
“It’s a number of people. I can’t give you all their names, but from all departments, analytics from the training staff to the strength coaches, there’s a ton of people,” Schottenheimer explained. “And so it’s a big group, and honestly, they do a great job. They meet every week. They talk about our players, what our players need, where is this guy doing well, where is this guy deficient, how can we do this. I think the cool thing, I’ll speak to the group, is the players have really bought in, Todd, to the recovery aspect of this, massages, and we spent a bunch of money on recovery things and new resources with the saunas and stuff in the training room.”
Dallas expects to be indoors again Thursday, depending on the weather.
Hydration Readings, The Turf At The Star, And The Trip To Rio
Humidity and sweat loss decide whether Dallas goes outside, and the readings reach Schottenheimer each morning.
“I mean, there’s not, you know, it’s more the humidity and what are we doing from, you know, sweating. And we do all the sweat testing. We’ve got these cool urinals. I don’t know how much they cost, but they must have been expensive,” Schottenheimer said. “You pee and it tells you whatever your urination levels are, it’s crazy. But it’s all those things that go into it. That’s what you do as a head coach. You’re like, hey, how are the urination levels? Are they cool? Let’s go inside. They’re low, okay, let’s go outside. I’m making light of it. But no, I mean, look, if we can get outside tomorrow, we will. If we can’t, we won’t. But this is a long season. And, again, the one thing I will say is the turf inside, I think, feels better, feels different. I know we moved some turf around and got some stuff in there that the guys actually feel better on it.”
Ford Center’s listed playing surface is Hellas Matrix Helix synthetic turf, the same system installed when the building opened.
The routine Schottenheimer wants does not exist over the first three weeks, with a Sunday night road opener, a Sunday afternoon home game, and an international flight inside 15 days.
“Well, I think the way the schedule’s built this year for the first couple games, we’re not going to be able to have much of a routine,” Schottenheimer added. “So that’s why, again, the whole live in the moment, win the day, I think matters. But, again, if I felt like the only way for us to get ready to perform well in this game was to go outside, I can promise you we’d go outside.”
The opener is Sunday at the New York Giants. Kickoff at MetLife Stadium is 7:20 p.m. CT on NBC. Dan Quinn enters his third season in Washington and brings the Commanders to AT&T Stadium on Sept. 20 on FOX.
The Rio game airs on CBS at 3:25 p.m. CT with Dallas as the designated home team. Maracanã Stadium holds roughly 78,000 and hosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2016 Olympics. It is the NFL’s first regular-season game in Rio and the third straight year the league has played in Brazil, following two games at Arena Corinthians in São Paulo that each drew about 47,000. The league scheduled nine international games this season, a record, with the others in London, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Munich, and Paris. The NFL has committed to at least three regular-season games in Rio over five years.
Dallas has played one game outside the United States, against the Jacksonville Jaguars in London in 2014. The Baltimore Ravens lead the all-time series 6-1 and have won the last two meetings, including 28-25 in Arlington in Week 3 of the 2024 season. Jesse Minter is in his first season as the Ravens head coach.
