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Lindsey Thiry, ESPN
LOS ANGELES — Wearing shorts and T-shirts, and with sandals in hand, the Las Vegas Raiders trudged across the sand of Huntington Beach.
For first-year Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce, who grew up only 25 miles north in Compton, it was the quintessential way to end a nearly three-week stay in Southern California for training camp.
“When you think of Southern California, you think of the beach,” Pierce told NFL Network. “We’re going to do our jog through at the beach. … Get those toes, get those feet out.”
Southern California has been the hot — or perhaps more fittingly, cool — spot for NFL training camps this summer. It could be considered the Cheese League west. Up to six teams (Packers, Vikings, Bears, Saints, Chiefs and Jaguars) populated Wisconsin and bordering Minnesota — and their cooler climates — from the late 1980s to early 2000s to make up the Cheese League.
For the first time in California’s history, five teams — the Raiders, Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Rams, Los Angeles Chargers and New Orleans Saints — held training camp within a 102-mile span from Ventura to Orange County, and of the eight NFL teams that opted to travel away from their home practice facilities, four landed here.
“Why have we been here as many years?” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones asked rhetorically, as a thick marine layer blew in from the Pacific Ocean to cover the team’s practice fields in Oxnard. “It’s the great weather to prepare a team.”
The Rams and Chargers have intimate knowledge of this, given they’re based in the area, though the Rams ventured from the scorching heat of their soon-to-be new home at Woodland Hills to the campus of Loyola Marymount University — two miles east of the Pacific Ocean — for a two-week stay, while the Chargers broke in their new practice facility down the street in El Segundo.
Both locations are home to cooler temperatures — think high 70s to low 80s — and an ocean breeze.
“I love it,” Rams coach Sean McVay said of their location and the visiting NFL teams. “It’s great for us because now we’re getting an opportunity to be able to practice against a couple of the teams that are out here.”
The Rams scheduled two joint practices with the Cowboys and another with the Chargers, while opting to stay away from the Raiders and Saints, whom they will see in the regular season.
The Cowboys have made Oxnard, California, a second home, hosting training camp there nearly every season dating to 2001.
“You just get so many more repetitions,” Jones said. “You don’t have your dehydration [that] you have in other places with the temperature that way that it is, and you eliminate a lot of soft tissue injury. Just get a lot more work done.”
“I like everything about being here,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said ahead of their combined workout with the Rams. “The weather … the training here is — we have no limitations. We’re able to go as hard as we need to go every single day.”
Among the unexpected who opted to travel west for training camp: the Saints, whose Metairie, Louisiana, facility is undergoing renovations, and the Raiders.
Because of exclusive NFL marketing territories and infringing on the Los Angeles-area rights held by the Rams and Chargers, neither the Saints nor the Raiders, who maintain massive popularity in the Los Angeles area since being based here from 1982 to 1994, were able to advertise their training camps to fans.
So while the Rams, Chargers and Cowboys, through a grandfather clause, held open practices amid festival-like fanfare, the Saints’ and Raiders’ atmospheres created quite the contrast.
At the University of California-Irvine, a location available to the Saints after McVay’s request to move the Rams to a location that required less time spent bussing to and from practice, small signs pointed to a “private event” that no reasonable passerby would guess to be a NFL training camp.
“It’s been a good experience for us,” Saints coach Dennis Allen said. “The weather’s been probably exactly what I would’ve been looking for. I don’t think it’s been too cool. It certainly hasn’t been too hot.”
Only six miles north in Costa Mesa, the scene at Jack Hammett Sports Complex — the site that used to house the Chargers’ training camp — was similar. The Raiders held camp there at the suggestion of first-year general manager Tom Telesco, who held the same post with the Chargers for 11 seasons.
The Raiders did hoist some black-and-silver signage and welcomed a couple hundred invited guests, including some dressed in pirate garb, who were led in cheers by staff members as they watched drills from bleachers.
And while the Raiders’ most obvious reason for moving camp out of their home facility in Henderson, Nevada, was to escape the 100-plus-degree desert heat, Pierce said the decision was multifaceted.
“We’re building something really special. It’s a tight unit, not just with the players but our staff,” said Pierce, emphasizing the extra time spent together that otherwise wouldn’t be had if they remained at home. “Just eating together, being in their meetings, all of us getting together, understanding what we’re all trying to accomplish and hearing it from myself and from [Telesco] and then that going down.”
It’s all but certain the Cowboys, Rams and Chargers will return to the region next year.
It’s less likely for the Saints, who plan to return to their team facility with the completion of their new cafeteria. And it’s unclear for the Raiders, who will assess how the venture went. A return to Napa Valley, where they held camp for 23 years, could be on the table.
But if you ask the players?
“It’s beautiful,” Raiders right guard Dylan Parham said of camp in Southern California. “I’m not trying to leave.”