Schotty on calling performs vs. Rams: ‘It was enjoyable’

OXNARD, Calif. — For the primary time this offseason, the Dallas Cowboys lined up towards an precise foe, and a well-recognized one, when Sean McVay introduced his Los Angeles Rams to scrimmage with Brian Schottenheimer’s membership on Tuesday afternoon.

The scrimmage additionally marked the primary time Schottenheimer known as performs for Dallas towards an opponent, and solely 4 days forward of doing so within the preseason opener towards the exact same group at SoFi Stadium.

For although he was the offensive coordinator final season, it was head coach Mike McCarthy controlling the playbook and headset.

“Yeah, that was fun,” stated Schottenheimer. “It’s at all times enjoyable. You know, you get an opportunity to do that and you have achieved it for a very long time, however you get simply sort of misplaced within the second like, ‘OK, hey, what down distance is it? OK, what is the state of affairs? OK, who’s within the recreation?’

“But, look, at the end of the day, it’s something that you think about. When you get the job and you think about doing it, but when you’re out there doing it, the instincts take over and you just call the game.”

It was expectedly a blended bag of massive performs and a pair key misses, however the obvious concern was on the bottom, the place the Cowboys struggled mightily over the course of the 2024 season earlier than declaring, below Schottenheimer, that there will probably be a renewed concentrate on ensuring the offense might be bodily and “shove the ball up the opponent’s ass” at any given level.

The Rams, nonetheless, begged to vary, routinely stuffing the run on the line of scrimmage or behind it, and Schottenheimer went as far as to attract a circle round that portion of his in any other case profitable offensive outing that noticed All-Pro quarterback Dak Prescott and the passing assault have its means again and again.

“At the end today, I wanted to see if we could get physical late, and I thought we did that in some of the red zone stuff, but the film will come to life and tell me more when I get a chance to watch it,” he stated. “… Part of the explanation why you [scrimmage] is due to the scheme appears that you just get. We want totally different appears. We wanted the 3-4 appears, and we wanted a number of the issues that [the Rams] current and, fairly actually, they gave us some matches, so we had some communication errors and the run recreation wasn’t nice on offense.

“Some of the run-through linebackers, we’ve got to do a better job against that. But we got a bunch of work and a bunch of different looks and so, like anything, we’ll go watch the film here in a little bit, and usually it’s not as bad or as good.”

As famous although, the passing assault ate effectively.

“I think [CeeDee Lamb and George PIckens] made some really good plays,” stated Schottenheimer when particularly requested concerning the WR duo. “You see their ability to separate and get contested balls, and things like that. Again, we were not game planning. … But those guys, you don’t have to do much to get them open.”

Schottenheimer has routinely stated he’d run a vanilla offense in each the scrimmage and all through the preseason, having restated it so incessantly that you just all of the sudden end up craving ice cream by no fault of your personal.

With a 50/50 mixture of scripted performs and known as performs within the scrimmage, nothing was spicy or unpredictable, be it efficient or not.

It really was Schottenheimer placing his stethoscope to the engine to see if he might hear any knocks or bizarre sounds, figuratively talking, and now that he has, it is time to put the automotive again on the raise earlier than the journey to Los Angeles.

“I thought it was great work,” he stated of the info he can take from the scrimmage. “I think a couple of the guys stepped up and made some big plays, but there’s always things to learn from it. Don’t lose sight of why we do this. We do this for that exact reason: to get looks that we haven’t seen and different blitzes and all that stuff.”