IRVING, Texas -- Wade Phillips welcomed the media into his world Tuesday afternoon.

Phillips and Jason Garrett invited the regular Valley Ranch media to the team meeting room for a film session.

“All right, y’all shut up!” Wade said to welcome us.

After that good-natured jab, the coaches got down to business. Phillips and Garrett reviewed three plays from this morning’s workout, explaining in detail the intricacies of each play call and every player’s assignment. That took more than an hour, with the coaches answering dozens of questions fired at them by the media during the informal session.

It was an eye-opening experience that gave me a new level of appreciation for how difficult it is to play and coach in the NFL. The amount of information being processed during a bang-bang decision-making process is amazing. And we got just a tiny slice of their overall schemes.

The Cowboys, who requested that we keep the specifics of the session private, pride themselves on having simple systems. But it’s still pretty complex stuff. For example, typical offensive play call still consists of three parts that are between two and four words apiece: the formation, the blocking scheme and the routes/run. And many play-calls have a run/pass option, so double that.

The hour gave us a glimpse of how complicated the pre-snap chess game is, how quickly decisions must be made after the snap and the importance of precision. These are things most football fans know, but the insider’s view gave us a much better grasp of it.

And that was watching film of a few OTA plays. I can only imagine the focus and brainpower it takes to prepare for a game.

We walked out of the room with a much better understanding of NFL X’s and O’s … and an idea of just how much more there is to learn.