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Brian Schottenheimer’s long strange journey as an offensive coordinator
When the Rams hired Jeff Fisher to replace Steve Spagnuolo in 2011, Fisher’s first choice as offensive coordinator was Brian Schottenheimer. Given which of those coaches mentioned has won Super Bowls recently, who would have guessed that it is Schottenheimer getting the job as the next head coach of the Dallas Cowboys?
Son of Marty, the younger Schottenheimer got his first job as an assistant for Dick Vermeil’s Rams and has spent 14 NFL seasons as an offensive coordinator and never been known so much as a finalist for a head coaching job. Of those 14 seasons, the 11th, 12th, and 13th lowest scoring seasons in Schottenheimer’s resume are the three he spent with the St. Louis Rams under Fisher.
In two of those seasons, Schottenheimer’s offense ranked 21st in scoring.
In 2024, the Dallas Cowboys ranked 21st in scoring. Yet here he is, replacing former boss Mike McCarthy because Jerry Jones wanted to make a change and stay the same.
During his three seasons with the Rams, Schottenheimer spent half of the time with former number one pick Sam Bradford. In the first season, he had Steven Jackson at running back.
But for the second half of Schottenheimer’s career with the Rams, the quarterbacks were Kellen Clemens, Austin Davis, and Shaun Hill, while Jackson had moved onto the Falcons. The running back replacements were not good, the receivers and tight ends were not very good, and the offensive linemen were not very good either.
Did Schottenheimer get an unfair deal?
Aside from 2024, when Dak Prescott was injured for most of the season, Schottenheimer’s four best seasons as an OC have come over his last five years as an OC:
In 2023, the Cowboys ranked first in scoring.
From 2018-2020, the Seahawks had a top-10 scoring offense with Schottenheimer and Russell Wilson.
Could Schottenheimer’s two decades of experience as an offensive coordinator (with a stop as the quarterbacks coach for both Andrew Luck and Trevor Lawrence, two decades after he was the QBs coach for Drew Brees and Philip Rivers) now end up paying off in Dallas?
Or did the Cowboys make a decision as awful as it was confusing?
Schottenheimer now takes over a Cowboys team that went 7-10 and he is said to be targeting Matt Eberflus as the defensive coordinator. Though Prescott was out for half of the season, he was not good for the half that he played in. The Rams won’t play the Cowboys again until 2026, unless it is in the playoffs.
With Schottenheimer now running the show, is that more or less of a possibility in Dallas?
