I also saw T.J. Slaughter in the Atlanta airport. He still looks good, and is ready for the upcoming season, planning to return to Baltimore. “It was good up there,” Slaughter told me before boarding the plane back to Jacksonville. “It was the easiest workouts I’ve been to in the off-season, but we got a lot done.” Slaughter was going to spend a couple of days in town before heading to Miami. “I’m going to train down there,” is how he explained it. T.J. was returning from a trip to the Canadian Music Awards with his friend Vivica A. Fox. I’ve always liked T.J., and at least he’s always been pleasant when we’d run into each other socially. You can’t say that about most of the other players.

The Jaguars are going to be part of an ongoing “Hard Knocks” series on HBO when training camp opens the end of July. Here are Jack Del Rio’s comments about that from last week.

JACK DEL RIO NEWS CONFERENCE
JUNE 16, 2004 -

“I’m sure you saw the paper this morning referring to our visitors entering training camp. NFL Films does great job. As a player over the years, I’ve been aware of them being around and having guys mic’d and doing things like that. I think they do a tremendous job, Steve Sabol and the group, of capturing football and what it’s all about - getting sound bites, getting in the huddle. I think it’ll be a great opportunity for our fans to get an up close and personal look at how the Jaguars do business and how we conduct training camp. So that will be really exciting.”

(do you think this will help bring more attention to the team? Does this help with free agency?)
“I don’t know. We might scare a few guys away with how hard we work. I think any time you have exposure like this you get an opportunity to showcase the city, this franchise, some of our players, so I think it’s a positive. I look at it as a great opportunity for the city of Jacksonville and for this organization.”

(how have the players responded?)
“They haven’t had a chance to respond. We had our first meeting on it this morning, and what I indicated to the players is ‘be yourself.’ We’re going to do what we do. We’re going to conduct business as if they’re not there. I think after about two days they’ll forget the cameras are rolling. After a couple days, the fact that they’re there, they just kind of blend in and it becomes a non-issue.”

(any worry about trade secrets getting out?)
“Absolutely. That is something we are aware of and wanting to protect. They’re aware of the fact they don’t want that stuff. That’s not really what they’re looking for, but we will definitely want to make sure that it’s not going out accidentally. We do have a competitive situation that we want to protect. We don’t want to give our opponents a competitive advantage. They’re (NFL Films) not interested in that. I think the average fan, if you start talking about schemes, after a couple seconds of that, eyes start to roll in the back of their head and they get a little glossed over look. They’re not looking to portray that part of it. They want to get in and have the interaction between coaches and players, seeing football. Getting an up close look at what life is like in a training camp.”

(whose personality and talent do you think might catch some people’s attention?)
“Those players who have some hidden talents, we may in fact find out we have somebody that is pretty good. The next Jimi Hendrix or something.”

(do you have any talents?)
“My talents outside of football are minimal. I’ll let the players have fun with that part of it.”

(when you participated in Hard Knocks while in Baltimore, did you receive comments from friends and family?)
“I heard from family and friends. I think people who know you are excited to see it on TV. The thing I get is ‘I can’t believe you guys really do that’, or ‘the days are that long?’ A lot of people I’ve grown up with and know real well, even though I know them real well, don’t truly understand how much goes into it. When you get an up close and personal look at training camp, it’s like ‘You mean you guys are really there from 7:00am to 11:00pm every day?’ So it’s a good experience for everybody.”