LIVE: Brian Schottenheimer Press Conference | 8/13/25 | Dallas Cowboys 2025
Go boys. Go Cowboys. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Go cowboys. Go Cowboys. Go cowboys. Go Cowboys. Heat. Heat. N. Go cowboys. Go Cowboys. Heat. Heat. Go cowboys. Go Cowboys. Hey, hey, hey. Come on, cowboys. Go Cowboys. Um, I think that’s great. Obviously is close to his family like you are. How much does that help you fight canc? Oh, it does. I mean, you lean on those people. I mean, you definitely lean on those people and um the communication, you know, because like when you’re going through those things, again, mine was nothing like as serious. You know, thyroid cancer is the slowest growing cancer in the world. I was actually more concerned about when I had to have the surgery that I could lose my ability to speak and I was a coach, you know, because they’re around your vocal cords and Sam Wisher actually had something like that that happened to him a while back. But um man, without your inner circle of people and your family and your loved ones, uh it kind of reminds you of of what truly matters. Clarel was like, can you just talk about your cancer situation? A sense of what stage was it in? You know, how you said it wasn’t as serious, but how serious was it? Yeah, it was it was uh thyroid cancer. You know, I don’t remember exactly the stage it was in. I had to go to the Mayo Clinic. Um Crazy enough, um, we had just been in Washington the year before, two years before, and did not know this, but Dan Snyder actually had had thyroid cancer. So, I was not aware of that when I was coaching. And so, I went I get the I get the word and I go and I find my dad. He’s in watching the defensive film with the defensive guys and I kind of called him out of the room, said, “Coach, can I see you for a second?” I told him that I said, “Hey, I have cancer.” You know, and I broke down, of course, you know, started and I lost it. and he said, “Hey, you know, we’ll we’ll figure this out and we’ll get you the best help we can get.” And he picked up the phone and called Dan Snder, a guy that two years before had fired him, you know, and said, “Hey, let’s go a different direction. Did wasn’t going to work.” And but he said, I’ll never forget, he told me when Dan picked up the phone and my dad said to him, “Hey, Dan, I’ve got a problem. Brian has cancer.” Dan said, “Marty, give me five minutes and I’ll call you back.” And I think it was within 24 to 36 hours I was on the operating table in Rochester, Minnesota. Um, and uh, again, it just shows you when you’re dealing with things like that, you know, everything competitively stops like, okay, hey, you know, Marty and Dan disagreed, wanted to go a different direction, but the minute he picked up the phone, he said, hey, give me five minutes. And he called his contact at the Mayo Clinic, and next thing you know, I’m I’m on the operating table. My wife was pregnant with our uh for the with our first child. She’s about four months pregnant with our son, Sutton. And so it was a very um traumatic thing for me. Just a timeline of when you found out you had cancer to when you were operated on until it was all gone. Yeah. Uh it’s been a while, but uh basically found out early August. Uh came off the practice field, had a phone call from the doctor saying, “Hey, Brian, give me a call.” Um, I knew there was uh something a lump in my throat and so I knew there was something that was bothering me, but I didn’t think it was anything. The doctor when they did the fine needle aspiration, they didn’t think it was anything. And so I remember coming in from practice and picking up the phone and I knew it wasn’t a good thing. So I called him and he said, you know, hey, you have cancer. He said, hey, thyroid cancer is the slowest growing type of cancer that there is. He said, we can wait till, you know, the by-week or even, you know, after the season. I was like, “No, you know, let’s let’s remove it.” And so went into surgery about 48 hours or 72 hours later. Uh they removed my thyroid and I think there was 17 lymph nodes. The thing that’s so crazy about, you guys can see on my throat potentially, but you know, there’s a scar. Um but the thing about thyroid uh cancer is usually what they do is you do the surgery and they make you take a radioactive iodine. uh you drink a radioactive iodine um drink. And the beauty of what I was fortunate enough to do, and I say this humbly, was uh the doctor that did the surgery said, he goes, he goes, “I’m not going to do that to you unless I think I miss.” And he goes, “I never miss.” And so I think that’s why again very blessed to be in the position I was National Football League. And again, you know, quite honestly, we’re we are we are blessed to have some of the best connections to things like that. But like I’m honored and humbled to say that if it wasn’t for Dan Snder, if it wasn’t for the National Football League, you know, maybe my story was a little bit different. Brian with ESPN, I don’t know how to move off. No, it’s okay. Yeah, it’s been a while. And I still have my voice, which is good. I’m sure some other people think otherwise. Yes, they do. Um, a year ago at this time we all knew like Leaf could sing, right? Doing the rookie stuff. We haven’t heard anything yet on guys doing it. Have you not done anything or what’s the No, we’re uh Yeah, I’m not a I’m not a a get a guy up there and have them sing. Uh I’m more of a hey, let’s see a uh production. Let’s see a orchestrated uh rookie show. So, we’re going to do our rookie show tonight. We’re going to have a hell of a practice today. clean some stuff up with meetings and then I think at 5:45 tonight the rookies are going to put on a little um performance. I know they’ve been working hard on it. We’ll find out what hidden talents they have. I’m sure that I along with some of the veterans will be getting roasted on mercifully, but that’s all part of it. If you can’t laugh at yourself and have good fun, then you know, I think you’re taking yourself too seriously. But um yeah, I’m more that way. You know, I think, you know, if they if they sing, great, but if they if they whatever they come up with, it’s their deal. So, Brian Wanley and Tyler Bo, my chief of staff, they’ve been helping those guys put it together, and uh it’s been kind of fun for them. I’ve not seen any of it, but it’s kind of fun for them to see the guys that are stepping up in the leadership roles and and things like that. So, I’ll let you know how it goes. Uh do you have a favorite skit or whatever that comes to mind from your years being around? Well, I mean, Rex had a thing in New York, New York. I can’t believe I’m going to share this. Well, it’s on Hard Knock, so it doesn’t matter. Um, but he did a thing called King Ugly, and he basically would present a guy with a crown that he thought was the ugliest guy on the football team. I don’t remember who it was, but remember going, “That’s brutal.” And then it made it worse was it was hard knocks, right? So, it lives on forever. You’re like, “Whoever it was, I can’t remember.” Uh, I was like, “It’s so bad.” But um that was always interesting and it was a different guy every year which is which is kind of fun. John Michelle with the Athletic, we saw Brandon Aubrey get some work yesterday. Just what have you thought of what he’s been able to do out here and how do you I guess know if he’s ready for the regular season. Well, when I talked to Brandon, I think, you know, he he feels ready. I know he’s really loved being outdoors kicking with the wind. The wind’s been kind of a fun challenge for him a little bit. you know, when you’re kicking indoors all the time. I think he’s been maximizing those opportunities. Um, but I think he’s in a really good spot. It’s interesting for me having never really spent much time when I’m when I’m in those meetings when, you know, Nick and Carlos are going through the specialist stuff, specifically with Brandon and Banger, hearing the technical side of what goes into kicking a football, you know? I mean, I just kind of took it for granted, like, okay, yeah, you kick the ball and this and that, but the technical footwork and, you know, the the plant step and the follow through and all those different things. Like, literally, I’m in amazement in some regards. Like, there’s so much technical stuff that goes into it. And, um, I think he’s in a really good spot right now, very confident, but being outside and on the grass has been great for him. You guys getting ready to leave tomorrow, what’s been something that maybe stood out to you about your first training camp? Uh, I’d say a lot of things. I think, you know, number one, I love the environment out here. You know, we actually had a chance, we had a bunch of the uh resort hotel staff come in today and show them some gratitude and they said a few words and we thank them and got they got a standing ovation. I mean, they make it so easy for us. You know, we’re here working hard away from our families, you know, we don’t want for anything, you know, uh they take care of us in the food lines. They they they’re amazing. So, that was that was really fun for me. we’ll do something signing some autographs for them as well tomorrow. Uh but I would just say the the physical nature of the practices. That’s what that’s what I’m going to remember. Um you know, practice yesterday was very physical, very good, very competitive and another one today. So two-hour practice today and um we’ll be done with our padded work out here in Cali. Nick Harris, fourstar telegram. Just going back to that time when you were 28. You have that moment and then you also welcome in Sutton. How would you say your life perspective changed in that way? Well, that’s really when it’s funny because I kind of when I first went to San Diego, I was I was raised Catholic, uh, grew up in the Catholic church and then as I got older, I kind of became I was going to be more of a non-denominational guy. Um, when I first went to San Diego, one of the first people I met was our team chaplain, Pastor Shawn Mitchell. And he just was the most um upbeat, positive person I’ve ever been around. just a a a personality that just drew you in and um my faith really kind of took off if I’m being honest with you. And I became a much better Christian, a much stronger believer and my faith obviously is very important to me. I have my tattoos to prove that. Um, it was interesting how God worked because I found my faith out there and then I think it was about not long, less than a year, six, eight months before I got the diagnosis and I really leaned on my faith. It was a scary time, you know, a lot of things moving on. You know, again, I’m I’m not I’m not joking. I was I was I was terrified of the fact that I might lose my ability to speak because of my my love for coaching. And uh I was one of the lucky ones. And um again, I I I do I look at the scar. Uh I’d say, you know, I don’t stare at it because I’m used to it being there. A little bit of chest hair covers it up. But um again, I I look at I’m reminded how lucky I am. Rush, how excited are you? Oh, I can’t wait to see Coupe. I mean, Coup’s the best. Um I just loved his personality, the way he was just so calm, even. Uh can’t wait to see him, you I of course was, you know, pulling for him to go and get a great opportunity. If it wasn’t going to be with us, he got a great opportunity. Got, you know, great a great contract. So, can’t wait to see him and catch up. And I know he’s impacting that locker room, man, just like he did ours. And it’ll be great to give him a hug on Saturday. Easy game plan. Easy game plan. Uh, yeah. I mean, maybe. I’m anxious to see if he’s running some of the power read and stuff that Lamar’s doing. I I know he can. I know he did at one time, but um I should I I want to ask about his golf game. I want to see if he’s getting much golf in up there in Baltimore. Tommy, stcowboys.com. We’ve seen you get fired up when you see plays that you like on the practice field. How fired up do you get when you see George Pickkins kind of climb the ladder? Something we didn’t haven’t really seen him do too much out here, but we know he can do. Yeah, I mean, I love practice, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s George running up the, you know, and and high pointing that ball yesterday or Malik Hooker on the interception. And it’s a great play by Malik. I mean, I just love seeing our guys as a unit flash. And I kind of talked to the guys in the team meeting today about, you know, when you have a competitive practice, there should be back and forth. There should be the offense makes a big play and then the defense responds and then the defense makes a turnover and then the offense scores a touchdown. Like, that’s how you know your practices are competitive because there’s the back and forth. There’s the good, the bad, and um we talked a little bit today about sudden change and capturing and seizing that momentum. Uh we’re going to be a team that takes the football away. That’s that’s our goal. We’re trying to get three takeaways every game and the goal on offense to give away zero. So, I do think that there’s a way that we want to treat sudden change in terms of the process of getting our minds right to reset and focus that we talked about with the guys that you’ll see us drill out there today. You said that you’re expecting to get roasted tonight at the rookie show. Who do you think can get you the best or impersonate you the best? I don’t know. Um, I’m sure there’ll be a number of things. I really don’t know. I think Justin Baron’s got a big big part of this is kind of what I’m hearing. So, we’ll see. He might be a little bit nervous. We’ll see. These guys are probably all going to have to do a shot of something before they go up in front of me and all the guys. But, I told him, I said, “Hey, look guys, hey, have fun with it.” You know, seriously, have fun with it. Like, you’re not going to hurt my feelings or the guys’ feelings. We’re not going to take it personal. That’s part of the connection piece. You know, if you can’t laugh at yourself, if you can’t laugh at one another, then what are we doing? Joe White, Dallas Point News. Forgive me if this is just me not knowing, but have you ever publicly revealed that you have the thyroid cancer ordeal? Um, and if this is your first time, why did you kind of feel it was important to share it? You know, I don’t think I’ve ever kept it from anybody. I I don’t think maybe I’ve ever been asked. I think it was just, you know, Jerry, you know, and how powerful his story is. And again, I’m not comparing my story to Jerry’s or anybody else. It’s it’s my story. And like I started out with, mine was a lot less significant and serious than other people’s, but it just speaks to again like, you know, here I sit and it could have gone a lot of different directions, just like Jerry’s story could have gone a lot of different directions, but it’s nothing that I keep private. Um, it’s hard to keep private when you do have the scar on your neck. And um but it’s one of those things that my heart does go out to people that have to deal with cancer or any disease that that that can be deadly and and and take a turn for the worst. You share with us pretty clear points that you talk to your team about every day and they differentiate every day. How do you go about preparing what you’re going to tell the team every day, what you’re going to talk about, what you want to do. How do you go about preparing that? Well, the biggest thing I’d say is I never want my team meetings to feel like a team meeting. Um, I do, you know, a lot of work with Tyler Boils, Ryan Feeder, a couple other guys in terms of just changing it up. You know, I don’t want these guys to come in and be like, “Oh, he’s doing this, he’s doing this, this is the flow.” So, I try to keep them on their toes. I try to keep them interesting. Um, but we look for different things. You know, we look for things that we try to speak about in terms of current events that are going on, philosophical things that affect us. Um, football specific game management stuff. We always compete, find different competitions, whether it’s golf, ping pong, you know, basketball, whatever it is. Today, we showed a video of, you know, breaking news of the AP top 25, you know, coming out. So, Demo is all fired up. He and Micah and Miles about, you know, Texas and uh and Penn State being up there high. I do think that Florida got, you know, cheated a little bit. I think we should be higher than 15, but um people were quick to point out Mississippi State wasn’t on there. So, yeah, Dak didn’t really like that. But I think, you know, to answer your question, I just, you know, I’m going to get my points across, but I also don’t want it to be like, all right, how much longer shot he going to go for? I want to keep it fun. I want to keep it upbeat. I teach, we watch practice clips. Uh, we showed the sudden change um from the other day against the Rams where Joe had the interception, the defense got the ball back, and then we missed the explosive and just talked about momentum and things like that. So, uh, I’m going to give a lot of credit to Tyler Boils, my chief of staff. He’s incredible. Uh Ryan Feeder is a great sounding board and um there’s some of the guys in the video department that find some of the stuff off the wall too to show every day. Um John asks you what stood out to you most about your headach. I think the favorite part that I have is this with you guys every day. Uh no, just kidding. Um, man, the meetings, you know, I really do. I love I’m pretty simple guy, you know. I’ve got my family, I’ve got my faith, and then I’ve got football. I just love it. I could do football 247, but to sit in the meetings and hear the coaches just hammer on guys and the different points, and they coach them. I get I get excited to hear our coaches teach because I think they do an awesome job of teaching. And then I’m real big. I say it, you know, they they used to make fun of me. It’ll probably show up in the rookie show. I say write this down a lot because I do think that the mother of all learning is to write things down. So the guys always have to have their notebooks out. But um I’m just a football junkie and you could be in the weight room, could be in the locker room, could be on the practice field. If I’m doing football, I’m pretty happy. Which part? No, pre- snap penalties are not my favorite part. And uh so actually we had on Malik’s interception yesterday there was we have the officials out here. Allan Eck and his team are out here be out there with us again today. And uh on Malik’s great interception there was a a penalty called for um lining up in the neutral zone off sides. So I showed that to the group today and again pointed out like here’s a huge momentum swing but because we didn’t take the time to check our alignment we were off sides. That play comes back. So um the discipline piece we’ve been hammering pretty hard. question on that. Um it’s something that the team has struggled with for a couple seasons or several. Um what goes into that? What goes into I mean it’s pretty simple. It’s discipline and I’ve been a part of it but I’m not going to say that you know ultimately I was uh in charge of all of that. I think you know you have to teach these guys. I’m not a guy that shies away from anything. I love hard conversations. I like bringing guys in. I like I don’t mind calling guys out. They know I love them. They know I care about them. if I call a guy out, it’s not because uh I don’t care about him. It’s that hey, if this hurts our ability to win, that’s the that’s the goal. The goal is to win. And not just win, it’s to win a Super Bowl. And so, um I have zero problem pointing those things out. But I think what happens is if you don’t point them out, then you’re almost making it seem to them like, oh, these are okay. They’re not okay. And we obviously didn’t do a great job of it last year. We didn’t do a great job of it, you know, in this past game. And so a couple things I’m looking for in this upcoming game against Baltimore is I’d love us to start faster. One, I’d like us to play with more discipline, you know, in terms of the pre-nap penalties, and I’d love to see us tackle better on defense. Hey, Coach Patrick WC.com. Kind of a two-part question. First being as you guys transition back to the home front, obviously the huge positive is guys getting feedback around their families, their loved ones, but as a head coach, you also have the challenge of potential outside distractions. What’s your message to to the team as they transition back to Dallas? Well, number one, we want, you know, we want them to reconnect with their families. You know, I want them all taking their family, their kids to school on Friday. You know, Friday will be an off day. Take your kids to school, man. And, you know, be around your family. Reconnect. What’s going on? I mean, I’ve got a daughter checking into, you know, moving into college that I’ve barely talked to. So, you know, um I obviously can’t get to her, but you know, I hope she can give me 10 or 15 minutes just to touch base on how everything’s going with sorority rush and all that stuff, but you know, when you play this game and it takes you away from a lot of things and sacrifices, which we should make and we openly make because we want to and we want to be great. When you get those opportunities to pause and celebrate and be around your family, I want them to do that. So, we’ll do that on Friday because obviously there’s a transition. We have to get everything set back up. We’ll meet back up Saturday morning, get ready for the game, and um we’re going to stay in kind of a training camp mode for a little while. We’re not going to an inseason schedule right away. Why? I think we’re still in the process of evaluation. We’re still in the process of growing as a football team. We’re still going to have night meetings. We’re still going to do things. We’ve got a few of the night practices coming up as well, but uh training camp can continue in uh in Fris for a couple days. Second part of that question is from you guys arrival on July 20th to now. I know you spoke about the physicality a little bit. What are you most proud of as far as the progress you’ve seen over these past three weeks or so? It’s funny you ask that because I think I was literally thinking about it earlier today. Yesterday, you know, we we’ve struggled to stay on our feet with padded practices. I thought yesterday was our best day of practicing in pads and not having guys on the ground. And so that was one of the things that just stood out to me, you know, Patrick, when you asked the question because I was thinking about it earlier. I was like, as I watched the film, I usually watch the film with the staffs and then I’ll watch it again either at night or in the morning. And I was kind of like, hm, maybe we’re figuring this thing out because we’re going to be in pads some. We’re going to practice in pads during the during the season. And you have to do that and still be able to stay on the ground. So, that’s one thing that just popped out when you asked the question. I was like that that was something I think, you know, hey, maybe we’re getting it. It gets you excited as a coach. Patrick, I ask you about the positives. Any concerns or uh things that you don’t got to uh coming out of camp for this camp, you know, I’m cornerback. Anything that you’re concerned with about this team? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, at the end of the day, it’s not concerns, it’s figuring out these position battles. You know, there’s a ton of position battles where we’re going to have to make some really tough decisions and we’re going to have to go back and you’ll see us do some one-on- ones today. you know, Clarence, because one-on- ones are a cool tool for us to look at. Okay. Hey, can this guy cover this guy one-on-one? Can this guy rush the passer and beat this guy one-on-one? But I wouldn’t say there’s things I’m I’m concerned about. I would say that there’s uh there’s some big hard tough decisions coming up that we want to make sure we’re making the right decision. Myself, uh Jerry, Steven, Will Mccclelay, his staff, the coaches. Um and so that’s why you have to have some of these hard practice. That’s why we have to practice hard next week, too, because like we have to make sure we’re getting it right. And I think we will get it right. All righty. Thank you, guys.
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2 comments
Why is there a 7 minute intro??
Shotty