Dallas City News

The Dallas Cowboys face a relatively unfamiliar opponent in this Sunday’s season opener, the AFC North’s Cleveland Browns. While these cross-conference teams don’t see each other often, a key figure for the Browns has plenty of history with the Cowboys and head coach Mike McCarthy. Cleveland’s defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz, tangled with Dallas and McCarthy during his past jobs with the Eagles and Lions.

Schwartz was the Eagles’ defensive coordinator from 2016-2020, including their Super Bowl season in 2017. He had a very positive impact on them overall, taking one of the league’s worst defenses and making them good enough to consistently compete both in the NFC East and the conference as a whole.

Matchups against Philadelphia have always been some of the biggest for Cowboys QB Dak Prescott during his run, and for his first five seasons those games involved a Schwartz defense. While coordinators do change over time, especially with a move to a different team, Schwartz has been at this a long time and is only going to adapt so much. You can be sure that those years of going up against the Eagles will benefit Prescott, plus longtime backup and game prep aid Cooper Rush, as they get ready for what Schwartz might throw at them this week. They should also have confidence from having gone 6-4 against the Eagles during that time.

Before Schwartz ever got to Philadelphia, he was most known for a five-year stint as head coach of the Detroit Lions from 2009-2013. This coincided with Mike McCarthy’s long tenure as coach of the Green Bay Packers. As they did with most NFC North teams during those years, McCarthy’s Packers dominated Detroit with an 8-2 record while Schwartz was head coach.

Granted, Schwartz was not the Lions’ DC back then but he still had considerable influence on that side of the ball. To be fair, Detroit was a very mismanaged team back then and there only so much any coach could do. Plus, McCarthy had one of the NFL’s all-time cheat codes in QB Aaron Rodgers at his career apex. We’re now over a decade removed from those games and with two very different teams for both coaches, so there’s only much the history applies to now. Still, it’s safe to say that McCarthy has plenty of practice going up against Schwartz and will have lots to share with Cowboys’ offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer.

This familiarity goes both ways, of course. Schwartz has schemed against QB Dak Prescott plenty of times and had success against him. Some of Prescott’s lowest-rated performances in those first four years came against the Eagles, so Schwartz knows how to frustrate him. While Prescott is an older and wiser passer now, and he’s not running Scott Linehan’s offense anymore, we’ve also noted tendencies that have never left him since entering the NFL.

This will be just the fifth meeting between Dallas and Cleveland since the year 2000, so a lot changes between each game. The Browns are almost an entirely different team now than the one we saw in 2020, but Jim Schwartz provides at least one known element for the Cowboys and Mike McCarthy. We’ll find out soon how that knowledge benefits one side or the other.