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Former Dallas Cowboys player binged ‘Survivor’ and is now competing in 41st season

Former Dallas Cowboys player Danny McCray became a fan of the show “Survivor” after his retirement from the NFL.

The Houston native, who played at LSU before signing with the Cowboys as an undrafted free agent in 2010, got hooked on the series and binged 20 seasons worth of the long-running reality show.

Now he’s a contestant.

McCray and 17 others star in the 41st season of “Survivor,” which airs its season premiere at 7 p.m. Wednesday on CBS (KTVT/Ch. 11).

The contestants — nine men and nine women — on the show try to survive in the wild on their wits and ingenuity while going through a series of challenges without being voted off by the others. The “Sole Survivor” wins $1 million.

McCray played six seasons in the NFL, including five with the Cowboys and one with the Chicago Bears. He started 10 games at strong safety for Dallas in 2012 and was a fixture on special teams his entire career. He retired after the 2015 season. McCray helps run the Dallas Cowboys Youth Football Program.

Of course, McCray, 33, couldn’t divulge any details on how the season went. Not even his wife knows how he did.

“You’re not supposed to tell anyone. I wanted to keep it that way because I wanted everyone to be excited as they watch the entire season and not know how it ended,” he said. “So if [my run] ends on Episode 1 or ends on the last episode, I wanted them to be excited to be happy to see what I do best.”

Before filming began in March, McCray and the other contestants had to quarantine at a Fiji resort for two weeks. His biggest concern about the game was food and nutrition.

“I would eat a bowl of oatmeal, bananas, pecans and brown sugar and that would be my nutrition for the day and I would go and work out and see how my body reacted to that,” he said of his training.

“If I was able to go on throughout the day, not getting too ‘hangry’ and not get an attitude because I was hungry, then I knew I could make it out there on the island. And if I didn’t, I knew I had some more work to do. On a game like ‘Survivor’ that can get you into some trouble.”

Being a former professional athlete didn’t give him much of an edge, he said.

“Just knowing the history of the show and the challenges, and with 90% of them, being a good football player has no effect whether you’re going to win or lose a challenge,” McCray said. “You can’t tackle anybody. You’re usually not sprinting or seeing how high you can jump.

McCray was 12 when “Survivor” Season 1 premiered in May 2000.

He was a busy kid playing football. He remembers hearing about it but never watched.

“But after I retired I was scrolling through a streaming service trying to figure out what I can watch to take up all my idle time and I found ‘Survivor,’” said McCray, who attended Westfield High School near Houston. “I clicked on Season 16 and I started watching it and I never turned it off. I binged it all the way up to Season 35. So 20 seasons back-to-back, just watching ‘Survivor.’”

McCray had never been camping in his life. And he’s not a fan of bugs. But the challenge of the game drew him in.

“I started working out here at The Star,” he said. He bought some flint and tinder to see if he could start a fire in his garage. “I just wanted to go and compete and see if I could actually do what I was watching for those years I was binging.”

McCray is the sixth former Cowboys player or coach to compete on the show, including former coach Jimmy Johnson in 2010 and Alan Ball in 2017. One of the attractions of the competition, he said, was using his experience inside a locker room dealing with a diverse group of personalities.

“I wanted to take the locker room aspect of it and knowing how to navigate different personalities and people on offense and people on defense and guys who make a lot of money, guys who make little money and being able to navigate that and get those guys to respect you enough to listen to what you have to say,” he said. “I wanted to take that into the game and hopefully use that to my advantage to propel me as far as I could go.”

If you have any doubts about the authenticity of the show — and after 40 seasons, why would you? — McCray said it’s absolutely as tough as it appears.

“You’re out there. You don’t have anything. There’s no luxury items out there. You’re really living off the land and trying to survive on your own,” he said. “As beautiful as the scenery was, you’re still living out there trying to figure out how to make it to the next day.

“One of the first things I heard when I got there was, ‘whatever you heard about the show and thinking there’s port-o-potties behind the scenes you might as well get that out of your mind, because it is all real.’”

We don’t know how McCray did, but from the sound of his voice, it seems as if he lasted for a while, at least.

“I learned I could actually do it. I hadn’t been camping. I didn’t know how to live outside. Had never slept on anything but a bed, maybe a floor,” he said. “And you have none of that when you’re out there. As much as I wanted to do the show, I had no idea if I was really going to be able to go out there and live on the beach or help try to build a shelter and the other stuff you usually see on ‘Survivor.’”

“I know now, if I need to, I can do it. If there’s a ever a ‘Lost’ situation I think I’ll be all right.”