The Dallas Cowboys aren’t treating their red zone issues like a minor nuisance. Brian Schottenheimer made it clear the standard is higher than settling for field goals, and he said the problem has to turn into touchdowns, not empty trips.
“We are too good to be kicking the field goals we were kicking. We have to score touchdowns,” Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer said.
That message lands against a backdrop of a team that scored plenty overall last season, averaging 27.7 points per game, but still finished 16th in red zone TD percentage. The offense could move the ball and put up numbers, yet things tightened up once Dallas got inside the 20.
One of the issues, according to a post on X by Abby Jones, has been pre-snap mistakes and other self-inflicted damage in close quarters.
“I don't know if it's just maybe being young or performance anxiety, but like we had more self-inflicted wounds in the red zone than we did in some other areas. If you have a negative yardage run on the 1-yard line, that's a lot different than a negative yard on the 50.”
That’s the part that stings: in the red zone, every mistake gets magnified. A bad play at midfield can be survived. A bad play at the 1-yard line usually can’t.
Dallas does have the kind of pass-catchers that should make life easier in tight spaces, with CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens on the field. But condensed field conditions also give defenses more room to attack aggressively, which raises the degree of difficulty.
Tommy Yarrish of dallascowboys.com framed it as a matter of execution, the kind of thing teams spend all week working on and still have to clean up in games.
“Scoring in the red zone, or struggling to do so, is such a tricky one for me,” Tommy Yarrish wrote. “I remember when I was covering (the University of) Texas, there was a season where they couldn't get a touchdown from inside the 20 seemingly at all.
Every time Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian was asked about it, he answered with it was an execution problem. I really do think that's sometimes just what it is.
And sometimes it just kind of tends to linger around teams for a while.”
Meanwhile, the Cowboys are also dealing with other roster questions, including a full-blown fight for the left tackle job and a wait for rookie Caleb Downs to settle into the right role. But the red zone remains one of the clearest pressure points, and Schottenheimer’s stance leaves no room for comfort: the offense has to finish.
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