FRISCO, Texas -- Not long after he was named the 10th head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, Brian Schottenheimer received a text message from his high school coach.
"If it gets stressful," Steve Rampy wrote, "just give them a BYA shirt."
The message took Schottenheimer back 34 years to when he was a senior at Blue Valley High School in Overland Park, Kansas. The Tigers did not make the playoffs during Schottenheimer's junior year in 1990 and the players came up with a slogan for the following season.
On the front of the shirt was the school's mascot, a Tiger. On the back were the letters BYA.
They told the school's principal it stood for "Bring Your Attitude" so she would not get upset.
Really, it meant "Bust Your Ass."
Schottenheimer is a little more than a month into his new role with the Cowboys. He has put a coaching staff together. He went through the NFL combine in Indianapolis, straddling the line between installing schemes on offense and defense with the staff, as well as understanding the college prospects. The offseason program can start as soon as April 7.
Until then, league rules prevent him from having in-depth football conversations with his players, but his message to them will be similar to the one used all those years ago at Blue Valley.
"At the end of the day, I'm huge in work ethic, and I look for that in people because I demand that from myself," Schottenheimer said. "I really believe you can outwork people in every endeavor, but certainly in this business because people tend to -- for different reasons -- get kind of complacent. They get comfortable. The word I probably use more now is 'grit.' That's why it's tattooed on my hand.
"Absolutely each day, like, 'Hey, get up and bust your ass to be the best you can be or get up every day and work your ass off to be the best you can be.'"
Schottenheimer's journey to the Cowboys job was long and winding -- he was an NFL assistant coach for 25 years and had not interviewed for a head coaching vacancy in a decade. But those who remember him from Blue Valley High School or the University of Florida never doubted he'd be a head coach one day.
"I told him he knows more about football than he knows he knows," Rampy said. "His strengths were not physical. It wasn't like he was going to throw for 5,000 yards and he's going to run all over. His strengths were his mind, leadership and pulling people together and motivating teammates."
THERE IS MORE to the BYA T-shirt story.
"One of the big offensive tackles is pouting in the locker room, saying he didn't get a T-shirt, and I'm all about togetherness. If one guy is doing it, everybody's doing it or we're not doing it at all," Rampy said. "That's who I was as a coach."
Rampy spotted Schottenheimer, the quarterback and one of the team captains, in the weight room and started chewing him out, and then Schottenheimer spotted the tackle, who came in at about 6-foot-3, 255 pounds.
"Brian took his shirt off, gave it to him and got in the kid's face," Rampy remembered. "He said, 'You didn't want one before.' So it kind of spoke to accountability, and he wasn't going to allow a guy to poison what they were trying to get done their senior year together, and he's whining to the coach."
Schottenheimer's intensity translated to the practice field, too.
Andy Murray was the Tigers' best player, their leading rusher and winner of the Thomas A. Simone Memorial Football Award given to the most outstanding player in the Kansas City area. He also played linebacker.
Even though Schottenheimer was the starter, he served as the scout-team quarterback in practice.
"And you know the rules, you don't touch the quarterback, right?" Murray said. "They're running that veer option and Schotty's just tucking it up inside and he kept the ball. I just tagged him off. Coach Rampy was like, 'Can you get your man? Why can't you get your man?' Stuff like that. And it ticked me off good. I was like, 'All right, I'll get my man,' and I never dreamed they'd run the same play again.
"So I'm coming and he tucks it, and it was a good pop and he must've flew back five yards. He pops up and he's excited. And then Coach Rampy kicked me off the practice field. I thought I'd never play for Blue Valley again. But Brian got right up and started going at me, but he said, 'That's how championships are won.'"
And that's exactly what they did, despite Murray missing the state semifinals against Topeka Highland Park with an unrelated injury. Blue Valley trailed 26-0 in the fourth quarter. Schottenheimer remembers they scored their first touchdown with nine minutes to play.
"The game of football is such a momentum-impacted game that we got our first points, and then we got a three-and-out, and then we got some more points," Schottenheimer said. "And then they started to get nervous. It's 26-14 and they fumble the snap or something.
"The weather was terrible. It was a muddy field, raining, nasty. Guys were slipping all over the place. We were very poised and we just kind of worked our way back. I think we ended up scoring with less than a few seconds to go on, like, a quarterback sneak."
A week later, Schottenheimer directed another late game-winning drive to secure the state championship.
SCHOTTENHEIMER WENT TO Kansas for a year after receiving offers from SMU, Alabama and UCLA. He redshirted but still traveled with the team as a freshman.
"I really enjoyed it, but I also realized that my future wasn't in playing," he said. "My future was in doing something else, but that's kind of where I got the [coaching] bug. I said, 'If I can't play, then how do I stay involved?'"
He transferred to Florida to learn offensive football from coach Steve Spurrier, who knew Schottenheimer's dad, Marty, then the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. Brian went to Florida as a walk-on, promised a scholarship only if he made it to No. 3 on the depth chart.
"He was attentive about everything, that's for sure," Spurrier said. "He was always trying to learn everything he could about our offense."
Said Schottenheimer, "I was the signal guy [sending plays to the quarterback from the sideline]. He helped me actually begin my dream."
Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones called Spurrier before hiring Schottenheimer. Spurrier told Jones how Schottenheimer threw the first touchdown of the Gators' national championship season in 1996.
"I got mad at the whole first-team offense. They went two possessions not scoring, or something like that," Spurrier said. "So I was like, 'Second team, you're in. Schotty, you're in.' And he goes and throws a hitch to Ike Hilliard, and Ike dodges like three guys and goes for a touchdown. I probably should've left him in for a while, but I was just trying to teach the first team a lesson to quit messing around and score every time."
Danny Wuerffel was Florida's starting quarterback that season and would go on to win the Heisman Trophy.
"When [Schottenheimer] came to Florida, probably within a week, I could just tell that he's going to be a great coach," Wuerffel said. "His demeanor, his mindset, his being inquisitive about it. ... He was very curious, not just about how you run a play, but the theory behind it. Really smart at understanding defenses and what they were trying to do."
Almost every day, Wuerffel remembers something Schottenheimer told him when they were roommates for road games as seniors.
"He taught me how to fold and hang dress pants," Wuerffel said. "I didn't know that was a thing. Every day now I do it. If you grab them upside down, you can get the seams right and throw them on a hanger."
MARTY SCHOTTENHEIMER DID not want his son to follow him into coaching because of the time involved, missing out on family occasions, the pain of losing games and the possibility of losing jobs. But Brian was hooked before he even took a coaching job.
At the news conference announcing him as Cowboys coach, he recalled a story that Bill Cowher (the Hall of Fame coach, who was an assistant under Marty) told his father.
"He said, 'Marty, you're missing the boat. The fact that Brian got into coaching is a compliment to you because you made it fun for him. He respects you and he's following in your footsteps,'" Brian Schottenheimer said.
Schottenheimer's coaching career started in 1997 with the St. Louis Rams under Dick Vermeil. It took him to three different colleges -- Syracuse, USC, Georgia -- and eight different NFL teams, including three stops with his father (Kansas City, Washington, San Diego) before he joined the Cowboys as a consultant in 2022, working mostly with then-defensive coordinator Dan Quinn.
Since becoming the Cowboys head coach, there has not been time to reflect.
But in the 15 minutes he spent talking about Blue Valley, BYA and the Gators, there was emotion in his voice.
Growing up in Cleveland, when his dad coached the Browns, he leaned more toward basketball and golf. When the Schottenheimers moved to Overland Park, he decided to go out for football as a sophomore "to make friends."
He was set to be the backup quarterback, only to see the starter get hurt before the first game.
"True story: We lose our first game, I think 39-0. I was 1-for-5 for 5 yards and an interception. The next week we played better. We lost 38-0, so we really, really improved," Schottenheimer laughed. "But I just kind of stayed at it. I just kept competing and started figuring it out."
The Tigers were 8-1 in Schottenheimer's junior year, but the loss to rival Bishop Miege kept them out of the playoffs. For more motivation, he drew up a state playoff bracket for his senior year and taped it to the weight room wall.
That winter, Schottenheimer and a couple of teammates played basketball, while some others wrestled. One day the players were late or didn't show up for offseason football workouts, so Rampy tore the poster off the wall and shredded it.
"He was pissed," Schottenheimer said. "He's like, 'You guys aren't committed.' I didn't tell anybody, but I grabbed that thing and I kept it. So the next year, we get hot. Before the playoffs started, I kind of taped it up together with my mom and we posted that thing back in the locker room. The rest is history -- we're going to win and win state. It was pretty crazy."
BYA had worked.
Maybe it will work for the Cowboys, too.
