Giants Stay Home for Training Camp Tim Clayton for The New York Times The New York Giants training camp in East Rutherford, N.J. EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - Once upon a time, pro football training camps were like other summer camps: dormitory-style rooms in a country setting, a day overloaded with physical activities, communal meals and lots of late-night bonding. For N.F.L. players, the camp experience, which in their case sometimes included sneaking out in the evening to drink at local bars, was widely viewed as essential to the unity and camaraderie of the team. This year, the Giants, like many other N.F.L. teams, have not gone away to a relatively remote location in New York, Connecticut, Vermont or Oregon, as they had for nearly 80 years. The Giants instead chose to stay in the Meadowlands, where several years ago they built a state-of-the-art practice facility with offices, meeting and locker rooms, multiple grass fields and a massive indoor field house. The players are housed in a swanky hotel overlooking the Giants" compound. But is it training camp if you don't go away? What about sneaking out at night? What about the pranks in dormitories? What about the rotten, ill-suited dorm beds? "I do kind of miss that traditional camp life," Giants quarterback Eli Manning said. The fun part of training camp was that we were in dorms with large common rooms to gather in. You would get four guys together and some other guys would come by and we'd sit around watching TV and joking around. That was a good thing. But the little-boy-on-a-sleepover concept swirled in Manning's head for only so long. He looked wistful as he spoke of camps past, but he understood reality as well. The colossal practice complexes that many N.F.L. teams have built are serious-minded places that maximize a team's output. Why leave these palaces of productivity to go to some college campus in the hypothetical search of team harmony? "This year's setup is certainly more efficient," Manning said. You're not driving back and forth to the cafeteria or having a long walk to a meeting or to practice. Everything is here in one place: meeting rooms, video, the computers, the weight room, the meals. We come in at 8:30 for our first morning meeting and then we're here the rest of the day. But a camp by definition connotes some form of relaxation or recreation. Players living in dorms were renowned for taking naps after lunch and for playing poker at night - or for taking naps because they were up late playing poker. "All those things were true," the former Giants quarterback Phil Simms said. Guys snuck out at night and guys pulled all kinds of pranks on each other. It was a lot of fun. And in camp you did get reacquainted with guys you hadn't seen all winter because lots of guys would go home after the season ended. But the game has completely changed since then. The players don't go home for the winter; instead they stay and work out with their teammates in the off-season. They have these fabulous practice complexes, so why would they go to some subpar place? And all that sneaking out at night stuff would be impossible to do now anyway. If five guys snuck out late, someone would take a picture of them, tweet it, and those five guys would be getting ripped all over sports talk radio the next morning. It's just not the same game or the same world. The itinerary of a typical N.F.L. camp has also been altered by modern labor agreements, which greatly reduce the daily practice and meeting demands on the players. Gone are two-a-day practices. There are frequent days off. It becomes less important to have everyone in a remote college-like setting when training camp is turned into something like a 9-to-5 workday. John Mara, a Giants" co-owner, has been visiting N.F.L. training camps for more than 50 years. "You do lose something by not being in a dormitory setting, there's no question about it," Mara said. But there are many other considerations now, like the weather and an indoor facility. Because of the new collective bargaining agreement, we have a limited number of training camp days to practice. Missing a few days to rain is a bigger problem than it once was.