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By Jourdan Rodrigue
Aug. 20, 2026 5:00 am CDT
OXNARD, Calif. — At Yard House, a busy chain restaurant just outside of the Dallas Cowboys’ training camp facility in Southern California, a dream sequence for a football dork is unfolding: Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open” plays over the speakers as offensive coordinator Klayton Adams talks about run-game design.
Specifically, Adams is fascinated by what happens to a defense when the run strength of an offensive formation changes suddenly and at high speed. Some teams have tight ends (or even receivers) quickly sift from the outside of the formation into the middle gaps as the ball is snapped. For the running back, it’s like a miner using a smaller dynamite blast to clear rubble before the big sticks are used. For the defenders, it either moves a gap or creates a new one to think about in their assignments. Their math problem changes at the latest possible time.
“I think (it’s good) any time you’re messing with people’s eyes,” said Adams. “You’re still dealing with human beings.”
Adams likes that when these plays are drawn on a card, they feel “messy on paper.” Everyone wants their run drawings to look nice, he said, but on the play card they feel static. He wants his to feel alive. Just as the passing game should, Adams wants the run game to attack every area of a defense, not just what is in front of the offensive line. These days, such concepts have to do more. So do the Cowboys.
Dallas head coach Brian Schottenheimer called Adams, then the Arizona Cardinals’ offensive line coach, in the 2025 offseason while Adams and one of his three daughters were in the car on a drive to Las Vegas. They talked for so long — and Adams became so excited — that when Adams finally hung up the phone, his daughter turned to him from the passenger seat and asked, “So, are we moving again?”
In his first season as offensive coordinator, Adams, 43, helped lead the Cowboys offense into genuinely exciting territory. In 2025, Dallas finished No. 5 in EPA per play, second in yards per game and No. 7 in scoring (27.7 points per game); the offense scored on nearly half of its drives, which ranked second in the NFL.
The way the offense operated drew even more attention. These were not the typical Dallas Cowboys. Schottenheimer paired his West Coast passing concepts with Adams’ physical, diverse run scheme to create a system that was modern in its finesse and explosiveness and also a gritty throwback. Dallas uses motions and shifts in both the run and the pass game; their rushing attack features powerful gap concepts but also layered, stretching zone runs. They change formations before and at the snap. The Cowboys play fast — their passing game weaponizes pace. They want to chew up all of the grass on the field.
They were explosive — No. 7 in explosive plays in 2025 — and want to be even more so in the run game this year, as Adams’ system typically has been. Quarterback Dak Prescott was terrific in this offense, which featured two 1,000-plus-yard receivers, CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens; a 1,200-yard rusher in Javonte Williams; and a combined 1,075 receiving yards from Jake Ferguson (TE1) and Ryan Flournoy (WR3).
If not for the deadweight anchor of their league-worst defense, the Cowboys might have realized a far higher potential than their 7-9-1 record suggested.
The 2025 season was enough proof of concept for Schottenheimer and Adams to lean even further into what is working. And what is working can sometimes be a little alternative in theory. Adams got a lot of buy-in from players in Arizona, and the Cardinals had the NFL’s fifth-highest rushing success rate in 2024, ahead of rushing powerhouses like the Los Angeles Rams, Buffalo Bills and Philadelphia Eagles.
His job was to make the seemingly complex more realistic — to show players and fellow coaches how some of his creativity could translate into a physical, multiple running game that presents many different looks to a defense while keeping the intent of the play simple for his own offensive players.
“He knows that it’ll make things easier if we show (the defense) a different picture and still get to what we really want to get to,” said Cowboys starting guard Tyler Booker. “The key to offense is doing the same thing over and over again but making it look like 18 different things.”
It is indeed creative, perhaps more so than you’d initially expect from an offensive coordinator with an O-line background. Booker, laughing, said that everything they’ve gotten into so far has been “within reason.” It typically takes five to seven weeks for an offense to fully understand what it will be that season. By about Week 9 last year, Adams said the Cowboys were all-in.
“He’s a joy to play for,” said Booker, “because you know he’s gonna make you better.
“We’re very creative. We’re not one-dimensional. … We have the capability to run anything we want, to attack a defense’s weaknesses.”
Adams was a run-game coordinator early in his career at Division II Western Washington, a school at which the football team no longer exists. There, his Vikings kept everything on the table schematically.
“The players wanted to do cool things, and it’s not like there were 80,000 people there that were gonna throw rocks at you after the game,” Adams said. “I just felt like it was a really safe environment to break some rules and throw the rattle out of the crib, you know?
“I’ve kind of hung on to that a little bit.”
Adams draws inspiration from everywhere — the spacing and set pieces of soccer (his daughters play in a competitive club league); the “explosives” reel composed of every other team’s run plays of 10-plus yards and pass plays of 20-plus yards each week; his “cool sh–” file of plays gathered from every level of football. Adams once even got some ideas for a practice workflow from a gymnastics coach at a college where he coached.
“He studies so much film; I don’t think I’m ever in his office when he’s not just grinding on film and looking for advantages and edges,” Schottenheimer said.
“I try to be very curious. I’ve always been that way,” said Adams, smiling. “I wouldn’t say that I’m, like, really, really bright by any means. But I know when I see something that is a different color than something else, and I need to figure out what it is.”
He starts his play design and even game plans with “things that bother him” about the opponent. He tries to figure out “what will make those things not bother him.”
“I’m trying to do something (schematically), and they’re making it really hard,” he explained. “Here’s my folder of ‘things that hurt that.’ Because every danger has opportunity in it. If I think of things that way, I feel like I find solutions faster.”
This year, Adams is also installing the passing game for Dallas — a new challenge with high expectations, considering he is presenting to Prescott and the star receivers in meetings — but both Adams and Schottenheimer are pleased with how it’s gone so far. “It’s kind of good for me to listen,” said Schottenheimer, “because it makes my creative juices get going.”
Adams believes in installing an enormous amount of volume into his offense — the Cowboys will build a large library of concepts with players in training camp and then call back to them and add wrinkles throughout the season — because that means he has more flexibility within his scheme and can prevent the identity of the group from staying too rigid. An offense will naturally become different versions of itself as the season progresses; Adams feels he must change with it.
True leadership, he thinks, is a combination of elite problem-solving and influence.
“I want to give the players real solutions. I want them to go, ‘Yeah, I can’t wait until we call that play,’” he said. “I think there are so many ways that great coaches can simplify something that looks very complex. … The really good coaches are making hard things look easy, and they’re making them realistic. I think that’s a really important thing as a coach. You need to evaluate (whether) what you’re asking is realistic. If what you’re asking is not realistic to the players, they’re not gonna buy it.”
He will only suggest certain plays to Schottenheimer once or twice a season, just to make sure defenses are thinking about it when they play the Cowboys (the head coach is also the play caller). Some Adams is willing to keep in the folder for even longer, waiting for any tiny moment when football’s typical logic may not apply.
For example, Adams has an arsenal of designer runs that specifically want to take advantage of a pass rush (not just trap runs, he pointed out — those are old-school). A gap or split-flow zone play that can sell a run play as a pass, then flow to the run just as a pass rusher whooshes past the line of scrimmage, is a total high. It’s Wile E. Coyote, foiled at the last moment by the Road Runner.
Adams thinks the psychological toll of that happening even once to a defender can sow doubt and maybe even hesitation, which will ultimately help the quarterback and offensive line. Prescott and his receivers are so talented that running on a known passing (and pass-rushing) down would probably get Adams “booed out of the stadium,” he said, chuckling. Of course logic prevails. A run there is a rare call. But the mind games are fun to consider.
“Sometimes that works!” he said, still smiling good-naturedly. “And it puts doubt in a pass rusher’s mind! I think that’s a really important thing to do.”
It makes sense that Adams wants to understand the guidelines inherent in the strategy of football — but to also have a feel for when to bend them. He was a walk-on offensive lineman at Boise State, then a graduate assistant in 2005 and ’06. Fundamentals, culture and honoring the sport were sacred values under renowned head coach Chris Petersen.
But so was that creative flourish. Who can forget the trick plays Petersen called, or the David-vs.-Goliath magic of the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, where Boise State toppled Oklahoma? Adams helped coach that game before moving on to a low-level assistant job at Western Washington, then the rest of his career: three other college stops before joining the Indianapolis Colts in 2019. He still can’t watch the Fiesta Bowl replay; it’s too emotional for him.
Then, Adams believed that coaches like Petersen “walked on water.” He felt inspired by and called to the profession. Two decades later, that hasn’t changed, even if Adams’ playbook constantly does.
“The two things I’m (most) passionate about are teaching and learning,” he said. Those are the fundamentals. Be sure Adams will find his spots for flair, too.
Aug. 20, 2026 5:00 am CDT
OXNARD, Calif. — At Yard House, a busy chain restaurant just outside of the Dallas Cowboys’ training camp facility in Southern California, a dream sequence for a football dork is unfolding: Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open” plays over the speakers as offensive coordinator Klayton Adams talks about run-game design.
Specifically, Adams is fascinated by what happens to a defense when the run strength of an offensive formation changes suddenly and at high speed. Some teams have tight ends (or even receivers) quickly sift from the outside of the formation into the middle gaps as the ball is snapped. For the running back, it’s like a miner using a smaller dynamite blast to clear rubble before the big sticks are used. For the defenders, it either moves a gap or creates a new one to think about in their assignments. Their math problem changes at the latest possible time.
“I think (it’s good) any time you’re messing with people’s eyes,” said Adams. “You’re still dealing with human beings.”
Adams likes that when these plays are drawn on a card, they feel “messy on paper.” Everyone wants their run drawings to look nice, he said, but on the play card they feel static. He wants his to feel alive. Just as the passing game should, Adams wants the run game to attack every area of a defense, not just what is in front of the offensive line. These days, such concepts have to do more. So do the Cowboys.
Dallas head coach Brian Schottenheimer called Adams, then the Arizona Cardinals’ offensive line coach, in the 2025 offseason while Adams and one of his three daughters were in the car on a drive to Las Vegas. They talked for so long — and Adams became so excited — that when Adams finally hung up the phone, his daughter turned to him from the passenger seat and asked, “So, are we moving again?”
In his first season as offensive coordinator, Adams, 43, helped lead the Cowboys offense into genuinely exciting territory. In 2025, Dallas finished No. 5 in EPA per play, second in yards per game and No. 7 in scoring (27.7 points per game); the offense scored on nearly half of its drives, which ranked second in the NFL.
The way the offense operated drew even more attention. These were not the typical Dallas Cowboys. Schottenheimer paired his West Coast passing concepts with Adams’ physical, diverse run scheme to create a system that was modern in its finesse and explosiveness and also a gritty throwback. Dallas uses motions and shifts in both the run and the pass game; their rushing attack features powerful gap concepts but also layered, stretching zone runs. They change formations before and at the snap. The Cowboys play fast — their passing game weaponizes pace. They want to chew up all of the grass on the field.
They were explosive — No. 7 in explosive plays in 2025 — and want to be even more so in the run game this year, as Adams’ system typically has been. Quarterback Dak Prescott was terrific in this offense, which featured two 1,000-plus-yard receivers, CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens; a 1,200-yard rusher in Javonte Williams; and a combined 1,075 receiving yards from Jake Ferguson (TE1) and Ryan Flournoy (WR3).
If not for the deadweight anchor of their league-worst defense, the Cowboys might have realized a far higher potential than their 7-9-1 record suggested.
The 2025 season was enough proof of concept for Schottenheimer and Adams to lean even further into what is working. And what is working can sometimes be a little alternative in theory. Adams got a lot of buy-in from players in Arizona, and the Cardinals had the NFL’s fifth-highest rushing success rate in 2024, ahead of rushing powerhouses like the Los Angeles Rams, Buffalo Bills and Philadelphia Eagles.
His job was to make the seemingly complex more realistic — to show players and fellow coaches how some of his creativity could translate into a physical, multiple running game that presents many different looks to a defense while keeping the intent of the play simple for his own offensive players.
“He knows that it’ll make things easier if we show (the defense) a different picture and still get to what we really want to get to,” said Cowboys starting guard Tyler Booker. “The key to offense is doing the same thing over and over again but making it look like 18 different things.”
It is indeed creative, perhaps more so than you’d initially expect from an offensive coordinator with an O-line background. Booker, laughing, said that everything they’ve gotten into so far has been “within reason.” It typically takes five to seven weeks for an offense to fully understand what it will be that season. By about Week 9 last year, Adams said the Cowboys were all-in.
“He’s a joy to play for,” said Booker, “because you know he’s gonna make you better.
“We’re very creative. We’re not one-dimensional. … We have the capability to run anything we want, to attack a defense’s weaknesses.”
Adams was a run-game coordinator early in his career at Division II Western Washington, a school at which the football team no longer exists. There, his Vikings kept everything on the table schematically.
“The players wanted to do cool things, and it’s not like there were 80,000 people there that were gonna throw rocks at you after the game,” Adams said. “I just felt like it was a really safe environment to break some rules and throw the rattle out of the crib, you know?
“I’ve kind of hung on to that a little bit.”
Adams draws inspiration from everywhere — the spacing and set pieces of soccer (his daughters play in a competitive club league); the “explosives” reel composed of every other team’s run plays of 10-plus yards and pass plays of 20-plus yards each week; his “cool sh–” file of plays gathered from every level of football. Adams once even got some ideas for a practice workflow from a gymnastics coach at a college where he coached.
“He studies so much film; I don’t think I’m ever in his office when he’s not just grinding on film and looking for advantages and edges,” Schottenheimer said.
“I try to be very curious. I’ve always been that way,” said Adams, smiling. “I wouldn’t say that I’m, like, really, really bright by any means. But I know when I see something that is a different color than something else, and I need to figure out what it is.”
He starts his play design and even game plans with “things that bother him” about the opponent. He tries to figure out “what will make those things not bother him.”
“I’m trying to do something (schematically), and they’re making it really hard,” he explained. “Here’s my folder of ‘things that hurt that.’ Because every danger has opportunity in it. If I think of things that way, I feel like I find solutions faster.”
This year, Adams is also installing the passing game for Dallas — a new challenge with high expectations, considering he is presenting to Prescott and the star receivers in meetings — but both Adams and Schottenheimer are pleased with how it’s gone so far. “It’s kind of good for me to listen,” said Schottenheimer, “because it makes my creative juices get going.”
Adams believes in installing an enormous amount of volume into his offense — the Cowboys will build a large library of concepts with players in training camp and then call back to them and add wrinkles throughout the season — because that means he has more flexibility within his scheme and can prevent the identity of the group from staying too rigid. An offense will naturally become different versions of itself as the season progresses; Adams feels he must change with it.
True leadership, he thinks, is a combination of elite problem-solving and influence.
“I want to give the players real solutions. I want them to go, ‘Yeah, I can’t wait until we call that play,’” he said. “I think there are so many ways that great coaches can simplify something that looks very complex. … The really good coaches are making hard things look easy, and they’re making them realistic. I think that’s a really important thing as a coach. You need to evaluate (whether) what you’re asking is realistic. If what you’re asking is not realistic to the players, they’re not gonna buy it.”
He will only suggest certain plays to Schottenheimer once or twice a season, just to make sure defenses are thinking about it when they play the Cowboys (the head coach is also the play caller). Some Adams is willing to keep in the folder for even longer, waiting for any tiny moment when football’s typical logic may not apply.
For example, Adams has an arsenal of designer runs that specifically want to take advantage of a pass rush (not just trap runs, he pointed out — those are old-school). A gap or split-flow zone play that can sell a run play as a pass, then flow to the run just as a pass rusher whooshes past the line of scrimmage, is a total high. It’s Wile E. Coyote, foiled at the last moment by the Road Runner.
Adams thinks the psychological toll of that happening even once to a defender can sow doubt and maybe even hesitation, which will ultimately help the quarterback and offensive line. Prescott and his receivers are so talented that running on a known passing (and pass-rushing) down would probably get Adams “booed out of the stadium,” he said, chuckling. Of course logic prevails. A run there is a rare call. But the mind games are fun to consider.
“Sometimes that works!” he said, still smiling good-naturedly. “And it puts doubt in a pass rusher’s mind! I think that’s a really important thing to do.”
It makes sense that Adams wants to understand the guidelines inherent in the strategy of football — but to also have a feel for when to bend them. He was a walk-on offensive lineman at Boise State, then a graduate assistant in 2005 and ’06. Fundamentals, culture and honoring the sport were sacred values under renowned head coach Chris Petersen.
But so was that creative flourish. Who can forget the trick plays Petersen called, or the David-vs.-Goliath magic of the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, where Boise State toppled Oklahoma? Adams helped coach that game before moving on to a low-level assistant job at Western Washington, then the rest of his career: three other college stops before joining the Indianapolis Colts in 2019. He still can’t watch the Fiesta Bowl replay; it’s too emotional for him.
Then, Adams believed that coaches like Petersen “walked on water.” He felt inspired by and called to the profession. Two decades later, that hasn’t changed, even if Adams’ playbook constantly does.
“The two things I’m (most) passionate about are teaching and learning,” he said. Those are the fundamentals. Be sure Adams will find his spots for flair, too.