Rodeo Time Podcast<\/a> that when he was playing, training camp was much more physically demanding than it is now.<\/p>\n\u201cWichita Falls is the hottest place on earth,\u201d Aikman said of the Cowboys\u2019 training camp location at the end of his career. \u201cBack then you did two-a-days in that kind of heat, day after day after day, two practices a day in full pads. Now the restrictions, probably for the better, players aren\u2019t as taxed as they were.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Aikman added that there\u2019s a tradeoff: Players aren\u2019t as physically prepared at the start of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they only wear pads one day a week or one time a day, and they have a walk-through, and then after, I don\u2019t know how it all reads, but it\u2019s pretty player-friendly and favorable,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cAnd a lot of it, whenever they negotiate the CBA, the owners tend to always win on the financial side of things. And then the players say, \u2018Well, all right, then we\u2019re not gonna practice as long, or we\u2019re not gonna practice as often.\u2019 So, then they tend to get concessions when it comes to how much time they\u2019re actually at facilities. I think the only ones who don\u2019t have a voice in those negotiations are the coaches. They kind of have to wait till the dust settles and say, \u2018All right, just how often do we get them?\u2019 But some of it is that we see too is a lot of the reasons I think that we see so many injuries, especially early in the year. A lot of soft tissue injuries, a lot of muscle pulls, and things of that nature is the players, they\u2019re just not able to train the way that we once did, they\u2019re not able to callous their bodies as easily. Not that they\u2019re not training hard and all that, but it\u2019s different training on your own as opposed to being on the football field practicing football movements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aikman made clear that he\u2019s not opposed to changing rules to promote safety, but he does think those rules can go too far.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlayer safety is great. As a former quarterback, I do like that they protect quarterbacks,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cWith that said, the objective for a defense is to hit the quarterback and affect the quarterback and sometimes I think we\u2019re asking a lot from these defensive players, to try to navigate 300-pound offensive linemen and then not graze the helmet of the quarterback.\u201d<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s asking a lot of players not to really go full-contact until Week One.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman likes some of the ways the NFL has made the game safer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":525104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-525103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/525104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}