IRVING, Texas -- Mike Pope is entering his 34th year as an assistant coach in the NFL and his third with the Dallas Cowboys. Mike Loney is entering his 14th year as an assistant coach in the NFL and second with the Cowboys.

Together they will handle the tight end responsibilities.

While they know what they have in Jason Witten, James Hanna, Gavin Escobar and Geoff Swaim, they have no idea what they have in Rico Gathers.

Last weekend’s rookie minicamp was Gathers’ first football practice since the eighth grade.

“Coach Loney and I, it doesn’t say Houdini on our doors,” Pope said. “It says Coach. We can’t just make a guy, turn over, get up tomorrow and be ready to go. He’s going to be a while.”

The Cowboys know it will take a while for former basketball player Rico Gathers to get up to full speed. Tony Gutierrez/AP

The Cowboys selected Gathers in the sixth round knowing it would take time to turn the Baylor forward into a tight end.

Whenever a basketball player is looked at as a tight end the inevitable comparisons are to NFL success stories, such as Tony Gonzalez, who excelled in basketball and football at California before catching the most passes in NFL history by a tight end. Then, of course, comes Antonio Gates of the San Diego Chargers and Jimmy Graham of the Seattle Seahawks.

Gates at least played football through high school and had visions of playing both sports at Michigan State before eventually ending up at Kent State. Graham played a year at Miami after his basketball eligibility expired.

“He had some semblance but he was still raw when you go back and look at his college tape, which we did when we were evaluating it,” Pope said of Graham. “You wouldn’t say that you could bet this guy is an automatic winning hand. He got better as he got to New Orleans and got to do these things over and over and over again.”

The challenge of coaching Gathers is complicated because he does not have the base knowledge of the game that college players pick up over the years. What might seem elementary to some is foreign to Gathers, but the Cowboys’ approach with Gathers can’t be too much different than the other tight ends.

“As a general comment, you would say, ‘All of these guys need to get their fundamentals down,’ and that starts with stances and get-off and all the basic things that a player at any position needs to work on,” coach Jason Garrett said. “So we’re focused on all that stuff. You got to start from there with each of these players. But they do have to do other things. You can’t just say, ‘OK, it’s all about the stance. We’re not worrying about anything else.’ It’s the stance, it’s the release and some of the other things we’re asking you to do. But you do have to be cognizance of where they are, particularly in his case, where he is and where he’s been and help him.”

There is a good thing about coaching Gathers right now: He has no bad habits.

“He doesn’t have any habits,” Pope said. “That’s a good way to put it.”

But Pope sees the athleticism to work with, even as Gathers learns.

“Well, you just can’t throw him in there with the guys who do know what to do because his job is going to always, especially as a tight end, be related to somebody else," Pope said. "A receiver, if he doesn’t get proper depth, he screws up the timing. If he does the wrong way on an out breaking route, it messes up the receiver on top of him, so it looks ratty.

“He can’t play at full speed until he’s absolutely sure what he’s doing, but I think we’ll see that jump as we go forward.”