Brian Schottenheimer said Friday that the Arizona Cardinals run their offense through Trey McBride, and the Dallas Cowboys are preparing to try to take him away when the teams meet next. Schottenheimer framed McBride as the center of Arizona’s attack while making clear Dallas has plans for how it wants to handle him.
That is why Shemar James’ comments from Wednesday matter now. He said Arizona is going to force-feed McBride the ball, and the numbers back him up: McBride has caught at least seven passes in all seven of Arizona’s games, with 59 catches for 472 yards and four touchdowns. He also set season highs Sunday with 10 catches for 111 yards and a touchdown in a 30-16 loss to the Denver Broncos.
McBride’s workload has made him the easiest part of Arizona’s offense to identify and the hardest part to stop. Brissett leads the league with 282 pass attempts, and he has completed 65% of his passes for 1,600 yards, 10 touchdowns and six interceptions through seven games. Cardinals coach Mike LaFleur said Monday that Brissett remains the starter, so the passing game Dallas sees next will be the same one that keeps running through McBride.
Schottenheimer’s view is shaped by more than film. He coached Brissett with the Indianapolis Colts in 2016 and 2017, after Indianapolis traded for Brissett in September 2017, and he compared Arizona’s use of McBride to the way Indianapolis used Jack Doyle. He called Doyle a really good player in the league for a while, a comparison that says less about style and more about how Dallas sees the assignment: make one dependable target work harder for every touch.
That is where the clean script runs into the problem Dallas has to solve. Schottenheimer says the Cowboys have plans to take McBride away, but he also says the ball is going to go his way because the offense runs through him. McBride has been targeted heavily enough that taking him out of the game would mean forcing Arizona to lean on a different part of its passing attack, and Dallas has not explained publicly what that plan actually looks like.
The matchup now turns on whether Dallas can turn a player with receiver movement qualities in a tight-end body into a limited option instead of the engine of the offense. If it cannot, McBride will keep drawing the kind of volume he has had all season, and Arizona will keep leaning on the same pass catcher that makes its offense easiest to build around.
