Jun 27th 2008 1:10PM by Stephanie Stradley (author feed)
Filed under: Redskins, Texans, AFC South, NFC East, Houston, Washington, DCYesterday, I passed an article along that suggested that the Houston Texans were a team that compressed the time between training camp and the rest of the offseason schedule. I thought it might be an interesting experiment to watch.

Whoops, it turns out that the Si.com article was wrong about the Texans schedule. I contacted someone with the team, and they said that the official offseason workouts concluded a few weeks ago with the last day of OTAs, but added there are “a lot of players” working out on a voluntary basis.

Maybe it’s too bad, because Washington Redskin tight end, Chris Cooley provides some thoughtful reasons why offseason schedules make no sense. In one of Cooley’s magnificent blogs, he explains:
“If teams really want players at their highest performance level then have guys stick around until closer to two weeks before camp starts. If you want to give players a little more time away from the game, then give it to them in March and April. If I’m coaching, I’d rather find out that my players are lying around on the beach having a couple drinks earlier in the year. I certainly don’t want that happening with less than two weeks to training camp.”
That seems to make a lot of sense to me but the SI.com article explained that teams are reluctant to do it because it’s the only time coaches get much of a break. The coaches need to be around earlier in the season because of draft evaluations.