FRISCO, Texas – As Brian Schottenheimer makes the jump from offensive coordinator to head coach for the first time in his career, he called upon former Arizona Cardinals offensive line coach Klayton Adams to be his inaugural OC. On Tuesday, Adams spoke to the media for the first time since taking his first NFL coordinator position.
"For myself being a background of an offensive line coach, the opportunity to be a coordinator, to sit in that chair was important to me and had been a goal, something that I wanted to do at some point," Adams said. "Being able to do it with the Dallas Cowboys is a huge, even bigger opportunity."
Adams' role on staff is not to handle play calling duties, and instead assist Schottenheimer in constructing his gameplan each week. They haven't worked together before in the past, so the time they spent together now is all about figuring each other out and getting on the same page.
"Trying to mesh what the vision of what he wants is because he's going to call the plays, and so I think it would be dumb on my part to try to force a lot of things on that call sheet that he doesn't want to call or he doesn't feel comfortable calling." Adams said.
"We're really excited. I'm very excited to work with him and just to continue to learn each other a little bit… we're going to get out into some practices and talk through some things and I'm going to see some things differently, he's going to see some things differently, and it's going to be a growing process."
A large part of that process comes down to the players. With Rico Dowdle becoming a free agent this offseason and uncertainty about what the offensive line looks like next year, there's still a lot of work to be done when it comes to figuring out the pieces Adams and Schottenheimer will have to work with. That said, there are already some quality pieces in place in the Cowboys' offense.
"I don't know that we've completely gotten that far yet," Adams said. "We're working hard to evaluate what we have here, I think that there's a lot of nice pieces to work with and we'll continue to go down that road as we work through player acquisition."
Regardless of who the starting five are in the trenches for the Cowboys when the 2025 season comes around, Adams will still focus a lot of his work on developing the offensive linemen and is looking forward to helping to try to elevate their game.
"I definitely won't stay away from that," Adams said of coaching the offensive line. "I think that's a little bit to be determined exactly how all those things are going to work because we need to get out coach these guys a little bit and we need to get past the point where we're just all trying to speak the same language which is kind of where we're at right now."
"I want to have a great relationship with all these guys, and I really want to build genuine relationships so that they know that I'm here to help them play the best football of their careers and that they know we're going to have a very clear and communicated standard for what we expect from them."
Adams will work alongside assistant offensive line coach Ramon Chinyoung and new offensive line coach Conor Riley in working to achieve that goal, and was complimentary of what Riley's players have shown on tape during his previous role as Kansas State's offensive coordinator, which included the development of now Cowboys center Cooper Beebe.
"You can assess offensive lines or any position group really when you're evaluating what you think a coach does, but nothing speaks like the tape," Adams said of Riley. "One thing that I've always respected about Conor Riley over the years… the players play good."
The message that Adams has for his players is clear: Under his watch, the Cowboys are going to play physical and violent in all areas.
"The same thing that I want from every player on offense, and that is to create violence in the game," Adams said when asked what he wanted to see from his players. "Be aggressive, run, hit, I think that every decision that we make schematically needs to lean that direction."
"So if there's gray area, what is going to allow these guys to play more free and run and hit and be violent?"
That part will be up to Schottenheimer and his offensive staff to decide, and it's the aspect of this job that Adams is looking forward to the most.
"At the end of the day, our job when we're putting things on the call sheet is to be problem solvers," Adams said. "We're trying to figure out what do we do good and how do we make that look multiple? How do we make that look different? That's the part that I'm really looking forward to focusing on."
