Tempo appears to be an important thing to Brian Schottenheimer relative to Dak Prescott.
The Dallas Cowboys unveiled Brian Schottenheimer to the world on Monday afternoon and everything since then has finally returned to matters relating to football. He has begun assembling his staff in an official capacity and his vision for what the Cowboys are going to do on offense is seeing more light. During his press conference, Schottenheimer touched on things like motion and shifts relative to the offense, and that he will call the plays, which are all good things to hear.
Obviously Monday was a big day for Schottenheimer with the presser, but he also fulfilled other media obligations. He was interviewed by NFL Network’s Jane Slater and touched on two things that stood out.
He discussed last season’s offense and what he may have wanted to see, particularly moving forward.
“My focus is going to be on moving forward. Like I said… Mike [McCarthy] is one of my best friends. He’s a championship coach. Incredible success here. Incredible offensive mind.”
“Did we see everything eye to eye? No. And that’s part of coaching and that’s part of relationships. And I won’t see eye to eye with the staff all of the time.”
“I spoke a little bit of my exposure in Seattle. The Pete Carroll pushing me and asking me to, hey look at some of the things that they’re doing. I’m not a Sean McVay guy. I’m not a Kyle Shanahan guy. I was a Brian Schottenheimer guy.”
“But I was open to learning. I was open to looking at different things. And Pete presented it so clear to me in terms of the problems that some of things that those teams were doing, that was created for the defense. And so we started looking at it.”
“But what’s so cool about Pete. He said hey. Just look at some of the things that they’re doing. And don’t rinse and repeat. Make ‘em ours. Make ‘em, make ‘em fit. And so really, during COVID, we all had a lot of free time. Just hours. Just looking at things, comparing things.”
“Credit to Pete and him challenging me. We were a playoff-winning team, or playoff-qualifying team the first two years in ‘18 and ‘19. He just always continued to challenge me to get better and to always improve.”
This is a pretty politically correct answer with Schottenheimer paying proper respect to his predecessor in Mike McCarthy. It is also very clear that he holds a high regard for Pete Carroll, and it is nice to see that he followed the encouragement he got from him to study how both Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan operate.
In a perfect world the Cowboys would have an offense that had similar levels of success to those of McVay and Shanahan. It is commendable to not want to copy them entirely, but evolving off of them is a good idea for any offensive play-caller in today’s NFL.
Relative to what his own offense will look like, he also touched on that with Slater:
“It all starts with the running game. We’ve got to get the running game where we’re very comfortable with it. There’s marriage things in terms of, when you run the football well, how you tie that together with your action passing game.”
“What’s difficult about that is obviously it makes it incredibly difficult on the linebackers and the safeties that are down in the box trying to stop or commit to the run to cover the routes that are ripping in deep behind them and things like that.”
“I think the marriage of that will be really good. Again the tempo. There’ll be different tempo variations.”
“It’s something that when I was here as a consultant with Kellen… that Dak was very comfortable with. Very good with. We did it with Mike when I was here. But there’s a few more things that we’ll add that I’m excited to put on film.”
It is interesting to note just how much he emphasized tempo and how it is going to change a bit. The subject of Dak Prescott can be a divisive one, but at the moment the only path forward for the Cowboys is with him. They go as he goes. Getting the most out of a Prescott-led offense is going to be critical for Schottenheimer, although so will be establishing a respectable run game so that everything can work together in harmony as he alluded to.
The Schottenheimer era is officially off and running.