Cowboys' Worst Training Camp Disasters

The Dallas Cowboys are the most-watched franchise in American professional sports. That cuts both ways. Every signing, every holdout, every locker room fracture gets amplified to a degree no other team experiences — and the Cowboys, more than most franchises, have given that amplification plenty to work with. We recently catalogued the worst training camp disasters in Patriots history.

America’s Team has its own list.

5. Terrell Owens and the Three-Year Slow Burn, 2006–2008

Terrell Owens arrived in Dallas in March 2006 on a three-year, $25 million deal, four days after the Eagles released him following one of the most dramatic free-agent situations in NFL history.

Jerry Jones believed the Patriot Way-style discipline of Bill Parcells could contain him. Parcells was skeptical enough that he refused to call Owens by name during media availabilities, referring to him only as “The Player” — a tell that the coach already knew what he was working with.

The 2006 training camp set the template: Owens spent so much time nursing various injuries on a stationary bike that he arrived one day wearing a Lance Armstrong Tour de France jersey, which was either a self-aware joke or something close to it. Parcells didn’t laugh.

Owens was productive in 2006 and 2007, but by the 2008 camp the relationship with quarterback Tony Romo had curdled. Owens believed Romo and tight end Jason Witten were drawing up routes and holding private film sessions without including him. The resentment accumulated through the season until December, when Owens and Witten nearly came to blows at the Cowboys facility after Witten tried to discuss a route concept and Owens told him to stay away.

The Cowboys finished 9-7, missed the playoffs, and released Owens in March 2009. Three years, three training camps, and a slow erosion of a roster that genuinely had Super Bowl potential.

4. The Greg Hardy Signing, 2015

In March 2015, the Cowboys signed defensive end Greg Hardy to a one-year deal. Hardy had just been convicted of domestic violence charges in a North Carolina bench trial — including assault on a female and communicating threats — though the case was later dismissed when the victim chose not to cooperate with prosecutors on appeal. The NFL initially suspended him for ten games — later reduced to four on appeal before the season began. The Cowboys signed him anyway.

Hardy was permitted to practice in full during training camp despite the suspension applying to the regular season. Jerry Jones defended the signing as sound business. The arrangement collapsed in stages. Deadspin published photographs of Hardy’s victim that the jury had seen in court — photographs that made it impossible to treat the signing as a neutral personnel decision. Hardy was allowed to “come out guns blazing” (his words) for the regular season games he was permitted to play. He recorded six sacks and was released after the season.

The Cowboys had made themselves the center of the NFL’s ongoing domestic violence conversation at precisely the moment when the league was under maximum scrutiny for its handling of those cases.

3. Ezekiel Elliott in Cabo, 2019

Ezekiel Elliott did not board the Cowboys’ flight to training camp in Oxnard, California in late July 2019. He was in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, working out with Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk and waiting for the Cowboys to agree to make him the highest-paid running back in NFL history. The Cowboys had two years left on his existing deal. Elliott said he wouldn’t play without a new one.

The holdout lasted more than forty days. The images of Elliott lifting weights and lounging in Mexico while his teammates sweated through two-a-days in the California heat defined the summer.

Jerry Jones publicly said he wasn’t sure when a deal would get done. Elliott’s representatives said he was “absolutely not” reporting without one. The two sides eventually agreed to a six-year, $90 million extension in early September — the richest deal for a running back at the time — and Elliott returned without missing a single regular-season game. He rushed for 1,357 yards that season. The holdout worked, financially.

It also established a pattern: the Cowboys would keep finding themselves in these negotiations because they kept drafting skill-position players they had to eventually pay and then waited until the last possible moment to do it.

2. Dak Prescott, Two Tags and a Torn Ankle, 2020

The Cowboys franchise-tagged Dak Prescott for $31.4 million in March 2020 rather than commit to a long-term deal. The two sides had until July 15 to reach an extension. They didn’t. Prescott signed the tag, showed up to Mike McCarthy’s first training camp as head coach, and played the 2020 season without a contract that reflected his actual market value.