OXNARD, Calif. – Fresh off signing a new five-year extension earlier this offseason, Cowboys vice president of player personnel Will McClay has another draft under his belt and is getting a closer look at Dallas' picks in training camp.
While the lengthy draft process is behind them, there's still plenty of work for McClay and the scouting department to do especially given how last season transpired on the injury front.
"Very fluid," McClay said on 105.3 The Fan when asked what his role looks like at this point in the year. "There's camp, there's injuries, there's all these things that can happen. You go back to last year, we felt pretty good about what we were doing. We lose five defensive ends, we lose five corners, those are very hard position to replace, especially at a high level, so you've got to be prepared for that…"
"We're always looking and always trying to improve."
The Cowboys front office has been clear that player acquisition is always a 24/7 process and, like McClay said, they'll always look at every option to improve their roster.
On Thursday, the Las Vegas Raiders released defensive tackle Christian Wilkins, who was a first-round pick in 2019 and signed a five-year, $110 million deal with the team in March of 2024, but is dealing with a left foot fracture and was let go because of a disagreement between he and the team on the recovery process.
Nonetheless, it's a position of need for the Cowboys and an intriguing name to hit the market. Will it be a situation that McClay and the team take a look at?
"I mean, yeah, sure." McClay said.
While that work is being done off the field, it's been no secret that Brian Schottenheimer is looking for a fast, physical training camp on the field in his first run as a head coach in the NFL. So far through three practices, he's gotten just that, and maybe more than he'd like in some instances with a few skirmishes. That said, it's still exactly what the Cowboys want, and exactly how McClay and the team have gone about constructing the roster.
"That's Schotty's mantra and what we wanted to bring," McClay said. "It's fast and furious. You want to compete every day. That's kind of our mantra; the NFL is a fast game. We got these guys, college guys number one, you got to get used to the pace. Number two, it's about conditioning. If you want to play fast, if you want to be a fast football team, you want to play that way, you have to practice that way."
In today's NFL and the game of football as a whole, speed is one of the most important factors for success, and it's a trait that McClay learned the importance of early in his career from his father, Melvin.
"Football is a game of leverage and angles," McClay said. "My father taught me about that, that's how I learned football. You think about it, so leverage and angles, that's speed, right? I didn't go into math class, I went straight to P.E., but there's some principles that I learned, right?"
"The faster that you can play, the faster you can get from point A to point B, the quicker you can make things happen."
While physical speed is one thing, processing speed is equally as important to be able to gain advantages on the field.
"It's the old saying: Speed kills," McClay said. "If you know what you're doing, if you understand where your weaknesses are, if you know that if you're on top of things, if you play fast, people don't want to play fast. People don't want to play physical. If you can do it down after down after down, you impose your will on people, and you have to condition for that."
Finding speed during the evaluation process is pretty evident when you turn on a player's film. Something a little more difficult to ascertain on video is toughness, but it's equally as important of a trait to McClay and the Cowboys. So, that begs the question: How do you evaluate toughness?
"The guys are going to be put in situations that you've got to make a decision to put your face on somebody else, you got to make that decision to do that tough thing," McClay said, "The more opportunities we put you in that situation, or view you in those environments, that's when I can tell if you can do it or not."
Said situation and environments aren't just limited to the football field.
"We have to evaluate everything, and so there are key moments," McClay said. "There's little things like guys being in, even the chow hall, you watch them. Who picks up their plate? You're looking for all these different things, when he gets out there on the field, it's those instances where, hey, that's a tough situation, and he made the decision to do that."
And so the evaluation process continues, on and off the field, for McClay and his staff as the Cowboys head into their fourth practice in Oxnard and sit 40 days away from kicking off the 2025 season against the Philadelphia Eagles.
