Watching the four-minute video the organization dropped Monday, you’d never guess Brian Schottenheimer was just as surprised as you are that he’s the Cowboys’ head coach. He looks like he was born to it. Kinda sorta was. His father, Marty, ran four NFL teams. If coaching wasn’t in Schotty’s DNA, it was surely in the cards.
Except when you watch him jog up to players in Oxnard, Calif., partake in their patter, turn up the volume and the vibe, he seems less his father’s son than Pete Carroll’s.
The resemblance isn’t accidental, if you were wondering. Schottenheimer calls Carroll his mentor. Which is saying something if you know Pete once fired him.
Considering Carroll earned the endorsement of yours truly in the latest round of hirings out at The Star, it seems only fair that I give his protégé the benefit of my doubts. So far, so good. Schotty’s broken up fights, kept the mood light and reminded everyone to hydrate.
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He’s also just getting started, and, as usual, stuff is piling up fast around the Cowboys.
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If it’s not Jerry Jones seemingly taking shots at Dak Prescott and Micah Parsons or the short list of viable receivers on hand or Mazi Smith looking like, well, Mazi Smith, it’s the left tackle going down a day after the right guard pulled up lame and defensive backs dropping like Luka Doncic’s BMI.
Speaking of which: Was that really Luka on the cover of Men’s Health, or is Hugh Jackman his body double?
Anyway, all the stuff that made Camp Schotty fun in Frisco and now in Oxnard is all well and good, but sooner or later a coach has to show he can hold it all together when fate starts pulling at the loose ends like a cat with a ball of yarn.
Schottenheimer got off to a running start because he’d already seen firsthand what it’s like to deal with the general manager/owner/face of the franchise. He watched his predecessor burn while Jerry fiddled. Schotty seems to have the constitution to deal with just such a boss, though, as I noted from a draft presser this spring, he should work on his poker face.
Schottenheimer seems to have the players on his side, the chief goal of any NFL coach these days. If Schotty draws comparisons to a coach other than Carroll, it’s Dan Quinn, one of his best friends in the business. Wears his bill backward just like Quinn, though he favors visors to DQ’s caps. Quinn, if you recall, was extremely popular with the Cowboys. So much so that, if Washington hadn’t snapped him up, Quinn, who needed all of one season to turn around the likes of the Commanders, would be coaching the Cowboys now and Schottenheimer would be in charge of the offense. Maybe. Best he could have hoped before the Joneses got other ideas.
If you’re not aware of Schottenheimer’s curious route to head coach of America’s Team, it’s worth a look:
Went through five stops in his first five seasons in the business. … Turned down head coaching jobs in Miami and Buffalo because he figured something better would come along. … Took a job at Georgia without asking what he’d make, then, after informing his wife, sheepishly called back to ask for more. … Wondered when “something better” would get here. … Snapped back at Urban Meyer’s question, “What have you ever won?” with, “I’ve won everywhere I’ve ever been.”
But he’d never won anything as a head coach, and, at 51, as he recently told The Athletic, he figured he never would.
“I thought I had missed my window,” he told the website. “It’s a young man’s game. My wife and I would sit around at night sometimes talking about it. … I knew I would be good at it. I say that humbly. I knew that I’d be good at it because of my people skills, my ability to lead.
“But I had to come to peace with that.”
He was so resigned to his fate, in fact, he didn’t realize the Joneses were talking to him about becoming head coach until after the first set of exit interviews.
Turns out Schotty was wrong when he said being a head coach is a “young man’s game.” Depends on the man. Pete Carroll is 73, same as Bill Belichick, yet Pete’s on to a gig in Vegas while Bill is in Chapel Hill, N.C., wondering if a 24-year-old former cheerleader on his arm makes him look any younger.
By all accounts, the vibe in Oxnard this summer is different from Mike McCarthy’s last. Of course, as our Joseph Hoyt said on this week’s SportsDay Insider podcast, it’s probably not a fair comparison. Last summer the coaches were all going into the last year of their contracts.
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Hard for a lame duck to put on a happy face every morning, much less think to compliment a player, as Schotty did in the video, for his “sweet kicks.”
Yes, sir, the new guy has the look and sound of a coach who wakes up every day tantalized by the thought of what’s next. Here’s hoping Jerry doesn’t beat it out of him before the season starts.
Twitter/X: @KSherringtonDMN
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