With the offseason stretching from February to August, teams have months to prepare, build their rosters, and get ready for the season. But keeping tabs on what’s happening at other camps can be difficult. For many, X (formerly Twitter) has become one of the quickest ways to find out what’s happening around the league. With news moving quickly on the platform, even coaches can find it difficult to stay off their phones. Dallas Cowboys rookie first-round pick Caleb Downs recently made a bold claim about coaches and their phone use.
On an episode of the Downs 2 Business podcast on September 16, the former Arizona Cardinals safety, Tyrann Mathieu, said, “Coaches always tell you ‘Don’t read that (expletive),’ but they read it all day, you know what I’m saying?” “They read that (expletive) all day.”
Rookie Downs had his answer ready as he replied, “Some of our coaches here, they be on Twitter more than the players, overly too much.”
We have always seen coaches complain about players’ addiction. For instance, Kliff Kingsbury, the former Arizona Cardinals’ head coach during his first year, gave players “cellphone breaks” during team meetings
“They’re itching to get to those things,” he said. “You start to see kind of hands twitching and legs shaking, and you know they need to get that social media fix.”
But as Downs said, it’s just not players.
In December 2005, we saw how the NFL fined former Atlanta Falcons coach Jim Mora $25,000 in January 2006 for using a cell phone on the sidelines. Back in 2023, Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor was revealed to have a Twitter burner account, according to local media. The detail emerged on The Athletic’s Hear That Podcast Growlin. Taylor reportedly used the account not to interact with fans but to quietly track news, fan sentiment, and media coverage without attracting attention.
Now Dallas coaches find themselves in the hot seat after Downs’ bold revelation. While Downs did not mention the coaches’ names, for head coach Brian Schottenheimer, the introduction to X came very late.
In 2019, the present Dallas head coach was the offensive coordinator for the Seattle Seahawks. Back then, he joined Twitter to help raise awareness for Alzheimer’s, which his father, NFL coaching legend Marty Schottenheimer, was suffering from.
Even though the coach’s name remains masked, Downs’ remark sparked criticism because of the poor timing.
The Dallas Cowboys kicked off the 2026 season with a 28-20 loss against the NFC East rival New York Giants on Sunday Night Football.
“Overall as a football team, we were pretty poor,” Schottenheimer said after the game. “That’s certainly not our standard. We certainly didn’t come out of the gate fast enough on either side of the ball. This is a humbling business, and we got humbled.”
Fans and critics are blaming Cowboys coaches for failing to provide adequate defensive support for Downs.
“You would have thought Caleb Downs, with how much noise was coming out of training camp, about this being his defense and how much he’s making a difference, (the Giants) took (receiver) Isaiah Likely and said, ‘Hey, we’re just going to attack this kid; if this is the head of the snake, we’re going to cut the head off the snake and show you guys that your best player doesn’t matter, and we don’t care,” blasted former Seattle Seahawks player Richard Sherman.
He did not hesitate to criticize what they saw as widespread “lazy coordinating” from coaches around the NFL during a Week 1 that saw offenses score at historic levels.
The Cowboys surrendered nearly 400 total yards, saw the Giants hold the ball for over 36 minutes, and struggled to find consistency on the ground.
A season opener loss hurts more when the Cowboys are hoping to return to playoff contention after missing the postseason in each of the last two years.