Pro Football / Bob Oates : Dallas Fans Pay to See Cowboys on TV--From Training Camp

There are many football fans in Los Angeles who have never seen a training camp in the 40 years that the Rams and, lately, the Raiders have been practicing around here, and understandably so.

But Dallas is different. The Dallas Cowboys have been appearing on live television in Texas six afternoons a week this summer from training camp at Thousand Oaks.

On cable TV, it costs $2 a day in Dallas to see the Cowboys practice for two hours at 5:30 Central time.

Service was uninterrupted last week when the program was presented daily from London, where the Cowboys lost to the Chicago Bears in an exhibition game Sunday.

“The response has been far better than expected,” said one of the producers, Ron Thulin. “People have picked it up (via satellite) from as far away as Anchorage, Alaska, and Berlin, West Germany.”

No Dallas ratings are available yet, Thulin said, but the program was a hit in Platteville, Wis., the summer home of the Bears, where Coach Mike Ditka was a devoted fan until last week. He caught the program on Satcom 4, Transponder 12, Audio 6.2, 6.8.

You can, too, if you have a dish.

The story in London was the enthusiasm of the British crowd for American football.

Danny White of the Cowboys, whose skills as a quarterback have won him more support in England and Wales, and even Philadelphia, than among Dallas media and fans, told British writers:

“This was the most encouraging crowd I’ve played for in a long time.”

Is it possible for a player to play football successfully for 11 or 12 months a year?

Mike Rozier of the Houston Oilers thinks it is.

The 1983 Heisman Trophy winner from Nebraska went from the Orange Bowl to the Pittsburgh Maulers’ USFL training camp in early 1984.

And later he went from the Jacksonville Bulls, another spring team, to the Oilers, a fall team in the NFL, playing steadily for most of a year.

Physically, he never missed a beat, Rozier said. But it was a chore mentally.

“I never did get tired, even at the end of the second straight long season,” he said.

“(But) when you move to a new team, the big problem is that you don’t know where your blockers are. The coaches all have different blocking schemes. You expect to find your blocker where he was in the USFL, but in the NFL he’s way over here.”

The announced hiatus of the USFL will at least delay a promising experiment in new rules.

The USFL’s leaders had announced two major changes:

--Players involved in offsetting-penalty plays were to “leave the field for the next two immediate plays from scrimmage, excluding kickoffs.”

--Overtime games were to be settled by touchdowns, if possible, or by two field goals. A single field goal would have been good enough to win only if the other team had been held scoreless through the full 15-minute overtime period.

These are creative propositions that have so far eluded NFL thinkers. In the NFL, fist fighters can go unpunished--as they are now after offsetting penalties--and none but the most partisan fans are content with a rule that allows a team to win on a cheap field goal before the other side even gets the ball.

Buddy Ryan’s gamble this year will be closely watched in the league, his opponents are saying.

Last spring, with his first draft choice as a head coach, the new leader of the Philadelphia Eagles picked running back Keith Byars of Ohio State, who missed most of last season with a broken foot.

Will Byars come back? That can’t yet be answered, the Eagles reported this week, since it has been less than six months since he underwent a critical foot operation.

What will Ryan have if Byars makes a 100% recovery?

“You’ll see a hands down, runaway winner for rookie of the year,” said Dallas vice president, Gil Brandt.

“Start with his size. This guy is a 244-pound running back who in high school was the heart of a 400-meter relay team that won the championship in the (Ohio) state meet. You don’t see any slow runners on a championship relay team.

“At 6-1, he was a starting forward on the state high school championship basketball team. You don’t see any weak players on a state high school championship five.

“And in two years as a ballplayer, Byars batted .480 and .520.”

Byars may be the best athlete in the NFL, Brandt suggested, which is why Ryan wanted him.

But not on one foot, which is why Ryan is worrying, if indeed he is worrying.

Writing to his fans this week, Don Shula, coach of the Miami Dolphins, made two points about his team:

--”Our linebackers have to be a lot better when you think of Bob Brudzinski, this being one of the years that he’s not holding out, and Hugh Green on the other side.”

--”Offensively, Dan Marino has been outstanding but needs to know a little more about the sophistication of coverages, but especially more about the running game. (During the exhibition season) we’re going to spend a lot of time with him on the running game.”

At 56 and starting his 24th year as a head coach in the NFL, Shula has not lost any of his enthusiasm for the game.

He said he compares each new season to his boyhood years as a football fan.

“The closer I got to the stadium, the faster I walked,” he said.

As the Raiders and Rams begin another schedule of exhibition games, they can look back on some distinguished history.

Of the 28 NFL teams, they are two of the four best since 1960.

The top five winners are the Raiders with a .657 mark, the Dolphins with .642, the Cowboys with .638, the Rams with .583, and the Cleveland Browns with .566.

Behind them are six teams that have won at least one Super Bowl: the Green Bay Packers, Washington Redskins, Pittsburgh Steelers, Chicago Bears, San Francisco 49ers and New York Jets.

The Rams have been consistent winners since the 1960s under George Allen (49-19-4), Tommy Prothro (14-12-2), Chuck Knox (57-20-1), Ray Malavasi (43-36) and John Robinson, 31-20.

They haven’t been able to win the big one, but they’ve won a lot of big little ones.

Discussing NFL training camps, Commissioner Pete Rozelle said: “With these imaginative coaches, there’s something new every summer.”

What’s new this summer is a series of joint workouts involving Ryan’s Eagles and Darryl Rogers’ Detroit Lions.

Going into their exhibition opener Friday night at the Silverdome, those teams are practicing together every day this week in Pontiac, Mich.

Said Rogers: “You get a better line on your new players watching them against another team instead of each other.”

NFL Notes After two weeks as a real estate salesman in Raleigh, N.C., veteran guard Steve Kenney has returned to the Eagles. Kenney walked out after Coach Buddy Ryan had kept putting him down. . . . Demonstrating that the life of a quarterback isn’t easy even in training camp, Miami’s Dan Marino and San Francisco’s Joe Montana both missed practice with injuries last week but came back this week. . . . Denver defensive Coach Joe Collier plans to have his entire defense in place by next week. “It’s usually the third preseason game before we have everything in,” Collier said. But this year, the Broncos will open against the Raiders, Sept. 7, in Denver. . . . Coach Forrest Gregg looked over his four Green Bay Packer quarterbacks and chose Randy Wright to start the first game-type scrimmage. Newly re-signed Lynn Dickey followed, then Vince Ferragamo completed 5 of 6 and rookie Robbie Bosco 5 of 11.