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Location, location, location.
That’s what the Las Vegas Raiders and New Orleans Saints were thinking when they decided to move their training camps to Southern California, joining the Rams and Chargers and traditional summer transplant Dallas Cowboys, who have set up shop in Oxnard almost every summer since 2001.
The stretch between Ventura County to Orange County represents the densest cluster of teams in NFL history, even more concentrated than the so-called “Cheese League” in the mid-1990s, when five teams held camps in Wisconsin and the Vikings stayed in neighboring Minnesota.
Southern California almost had a sixth team this summer as the Houston Texans quietly looked into moving their camp to Thousand Oaks, where the Rams were holding their temporary headquarters ahead of the completion of the Woodland Hills site.
With that in mind, we set out to visit all five Southland camps in a single day, understanding that the drive was doable but we would need a Star Trek transporter to actually see every team at practice. We would be on the grounds of each camp but would wind up interviewing a lot of blocking sleds and tackling dummies.
Nonetheless, Los Angeles Times photographer Brian van der Brug and I mapped out our plan to drive from Oxnard (Cowboys) to “The Bolt” in El Segundo (Chargers) to Loyola Marymount (Rams) to Costa Mesa (Raiders) to UC Irvine (Saints). Five teams. An audacious nickel package, to be sure.
Those stops in that order span 121 miles, but we all know that could mean three months in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“Everyone’s trying to get a piece of L.A. because of the weather. You can practice here. Think if you were in Louisiana right now.”
Maurice Jones-Drew, former NFL and UCLA running back
There weren’t a lot of cars on the road when I left Dana Point at 4:45 a.m. in hopes of getting an early start at Cowboys camp a couple of hours later. Brian was coming from Thousand Oaks, so we decided to work our way down the coast from north to south.
I…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/attend-five-nfl-training-camps-103028361.html
Author : LA Times
Publish date : 2024-07-28 10:30:28
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