SAN DIEGO – Early Wednesday afternoon, the Cowboys will board a plane and return to Dallas for the first time since July 28, but coach Jason Garrett acknowledged some eyes might have already been on the trip home than on Tuesday's practice against the San Diego Chargers.

“We as coaches when we look at practice, you can tell the guys were close to the end,” Garrett said. “That’s the nature of these last training camp practices, but I was proud of how we fought through some things. It was an ugly practice. We’re not going to send the tape to Canton and I told our team that. But you like the mental toughness to fight through it and then hopefully there’s a little feeling of a lot of the real physical work is done and you get a chance to get refreshed a little bit.”

While injuries knocked out many regulars, including Miles Austin, Jay Ratliff, Jason Witten and Jason Hatcher, and hurt the development of some young players, such as Morris Claiborne, Garrett felt the work in California was good.

“I thought we had an outstanding camp, I just told our players that,” Garrett said. “Training camp is where you lay the foundation of your football team. I thought we did a great job of getting ourselves ready in the offseason for training camp and since we were out here the team really worked very, very, very hard. Oxnard is a great environment to practice, a couple of good, competitive preseason games in all three phases and then to come down here and work against the Chargers was good for our football team. We’ll break and get back to Dallas and get into regular-season mode.”