The Kansas City Chiefs on Thursday night made it official and announced the Arizona Cardinals will be spending time at Chiefs training camp on the campus of Missouri Western State University in St. Joe. They'll be arriving sometime after the Hall of Fame game against the New Orleans Saints on Sunday, August 5 and stick around until an August 10 preseason game at Arrowhead Stadium.
Though it's not confirmed the St. Joe News-Press reports that the joint practices will likely be Tuesday, August 7 and Wednesday, August 8 but we don't know exactly what "joint" means yet (although sources tell me another meaning for that word involves smokin' the dope).
"Training camp is about us continuing our development and evaluating our players," Chiefs coach Romeo Crennel said in a statement released by the Chiefs. "We are very excited to be hosting another NFL team in St. Joseph. This will give us another opportunity to further evaluate our team under a different set of circumstances before we get into our preseason schedule."
About a month ago, Crennel was asked about the possibility of the Cardinals coming to town and why exactly that could be beneficial to the Chiefs.
"The pros is you get a chance to work against someone else other than your own guys, your teammates," Crennel said on June 1. "As practice goes on, you get used to your teammates. You know what their moves are and you can anticipate their strong points and their weak points and you can play to those things during practice. When you get a totally new person you have to go against, you don't know him, and you get a chance to see how your group is evaluated against a different group."
Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt pointed to the Cardinals travel schedule as one of the reasons for doing this. They don't want to play the HOF game on Sunday, travel back to Arizona in the middle of the night, wake up and then travel to Flagstaff for two days of practice and then get ready to leave for Kansas City. That doesn't make a lot of sense.
"There are many benefits to this arrangement and we appreciate Coach Crennel and the Chiefs working to make this happen," Whisenhunt said in a statement. "Logistically, it makes a lot of sense since we play Sunday night in Canton and then Friday night at Kansas City, but I've always found there's also great value in getting work against another team in a setting like this.
"We're looking forward to it."
So are we.