RIO DE JANEIRO – On Saturday, the Dallas Cowboys traveled to Maracanã Stadium in Brazil for a team walk-around ahead of their Week 3 game against the Baltimore Ravens.
Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer, his team, and the Cowboys staff spent around half an hour taking in the atmosphere and getting a feel for the field, which has been a big discussion over the course of the week.
"It's all a part of the process," Schottenheimer said Friday. "It's not my first time playing internationally, and I have no doubts that the field will be in great shape. They're working tirelessly to make sure it is. And we have other plans if need be, but our guys will be ready."
NFL field director Nick Pappas, who oversees field operations for the league, spoke to reporters on Saturday morning about the field conditions heading into Sunday's game.
"A lot of our mandatory practices, our standards and centric around health and safety, as they should be, right?" Pappas told reporters on Saturday. "We always want to put in some sort of standards that we can measure and enforce from a safety and compliance perspective. This field meets that."
"However, we also want to make sure that our athletes can go out and perform as well as they want to perform. That's the goal for our athletes, for the game, for the fans who watch it in stadium and on TV. For us, athlete performance is important, and I believe we'll have that opportunity on Sunday where they'll be able to go out and perform."
At 8 a.m. on Friday, Pappas, a NFLPA rep and independent inspector conducted a test of the field that passed all of the league's mandatory practices for gameday compliance.
Players like Dak Prescott will be the ones who go out on the playing surface and look to perform. For Prescott specifically, he's prepared for anything.
"I trust my equipment, the cleats that I'm going to have," Prescott said Friday. "Not really even looking into the news about how people feel about the field. If it's the surface we're going to play on, let's go do it. One way or another, obviously if they're going to allow the game to be played, it's good enough. Where I'm from, I've played on worse. Been tackled on concrete. So the fact the grass is soft, we'll take it, I'll take it anyways. I hope not to hit it anyways."
Some early complaints about the field at Maracanã Stadium came from CR Flamengo players last week, who use the stadium as their home pitch. Pappas says their grievances are more specific to their sport.
"A lot of the complaints coming from the clubs were really ball-centric," Pappas said of the comments from Flamengo players. "We're focused on athlete-surface interaction. Obviously, our ball doesn't touch the ground a whole lot, at least that's the goal of many of the players out there. For us, it's all about how can we get a foot in the ground, how good can it hold there, and how can we play the way we want to play."
As things currently stand, radars in Rio de Janeiro do not show any impending rain ahead of Sunday's game, but if it does rain, Pappas said the NFL has a full-field tarp that can cover the field.
The next time the Cowboys are on the field at Maracanã Stadium will be on Sunday for their game against the Ravens, which is set to kick off at 3:25 p.m. CT.
