Cowboys’ Brian Schottenheimer Opens Up On Major ‘Unacceptable’ Problem originally appeared on Athlon Sports.
For all the things that Dallas Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer will be tasked with fixing in Year 1, perhaps reeling in the penalties is No. 1.
Yes, the run game and the offensive line could be seen as more urgent, but we lost count of how many times last season and the year before the Cowboys were the masters of their own downfall.
Too many false starts, holdings, offsides and unsportsmanlike penalties all filled Mike McCarthy’s last two seasons in Dallas. In 2023, the Cowboys were third in penalties (115) and last season fourth (128).
For Schotty, he knows that his team has to be more disciplined.
“There’s all types of penalties, right?” Schottenheimer said. “There’s pre-snap, self-inflicted wounds where you jump off sides, false start, illegal motion, those are unacceptable because we control those. There’s going to be combative penalties. I do believe that being the most penalized team in the league is not a good thing. I don’t condone that. We’ll have more discipline than that and that’s going to be coached.
“You got to coach these guys, make sure they understand the rules, but penalties happen. There’s going to be flags, but the ones that we can control, which are the pre-snap ones and the self-discipline ones, we need to control those and keep those to a minimum.”
Granted, McCarthy stated the same thing, yet the same issues kept happening. The Cowboys simply couldn’t get out of their own way, and most of the time, those penalties came at the most inopportune time.
So, training camp will be used not only to hone the craft on both sides of the ball, but also to help teach players to be more disciplined, and we have already seen it play out on the field with several dust-ups having to be broken up.
We know there is a fine line with penalties in football, but as we saw last year, the false starts and self-inflicted wounds hindered the Cowboys.
And Schotty is determined to make sure the trend of being one of the most penalized teams in football doesn’t continue in 2025.
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This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jul 26, 2025, where it first appeared.