OXNARD, Calif. — For the first time this offseason, the Dallas Cowboys lined up against an actual foe, and a familiar one, when Sean McVay brought his Los Angeles Rams to scrimmage with Brian Schottenheimer's club on Tuesday afternoon.
The scrimmage also marked the first time Schottenheimer called plays for Dallas against an opponent, and only four days ahead of doing so in the preseason opener against the very same group at SoFi Stadium.
For though he was the offensive coordinator last season, it was head coach Mike McCarthy controlling the playbook and headset.
"Yeah, that was fun," said Schottenheimer. "It's always fun. You know, you get a chance to do this and you've done it for a long time, but you get just kind of lost in the moment like, 'OK, hey, what down distance is it? OK, what's the situation? OK, who's in the game?'
"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 mixed bag of big plays and a couple key misses, but the glaring concern was on the ground, where the Cowboys struggled mightily over the course of the 2024 season before declaring, under Schottenheimer, that there will be a renewed focus on making sure the offense could be physical and "shove the ball up the opponent's ass" at any given point.
The Rams, however, begged to differ, routinely stuffing the run at the line of scrimmage or behind it, and Schottenheimer went so far as to draw a circle around that portion of his otherwise successful offensive outing that saw All-Pro quarterback Dak Prescott and the passing attack have its way time 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 said. "... Part of the reason why you [scrimmage] is because of the scheme looks that you get. We need different looks. We needed the 3-4 looks, and we needed some of the things that [the Rams] present and, quite honestly, they gave us some fits, so we had some communication errors and the run game wasn't great 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 noted though, the passing attack ate well.
"I think [CeeDee Lamb and George PIckens] made some really good plays," said Schottenheimer when specifically asked about 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 said he'd run a vanilla offense in both the scrimmage and throughout the preseason, having restated it so frequently that you suddenly find yourself craving ice cream by no fault of your own.
With a 50/50 mix of scripted plays and called plays in the scrimmage, nothing was spicy or unpredictable, be it effective or not.
It truly was Schottenheimer putting his stethoscope to the engine to see if he could hear any knocks or weird sounds, figuratively speaking, and now that he has, it's time to put the car back on the lift before the trip to Los Angeles.
"I thought it was great work," he said of the data 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."
