This weekend, the Cowboys and 49ers will face off in a rematch of last year’s playoff meeting, when San Francisco defeated Dallas for a second straight postseason. The game will also mark the first time that Trey Lance will play against his former team since he was traded before the season.
Even though Lance will likely be inactive for the contest, offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer noted that they will pick the third-year quarterback’s brain for information that he got from being in San Francisco for parts of three years.
“Trey knows a little bit about what they’re doing,” Dallas offensive coordinator Schottenheimer said on Monday, via NBC Sports Bay Area. “The cool thing is, like I said, the [Cowboys] know them well, I know them well from being in Seattle, Trey knows them well.”
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However, Schottenheimer noted last week that Ezekiel Elliott and Will Grier, former Cowboys, would have been able to do the same thing for Dallas’s game against the Patriots on Sunday. Dallas went on to beat New England by 35 points, though, so any inside information didn’t do much.
Despite having Lance on their side, Schottenheimer acknowledged that any inside information won’t be enough on its own to beat a team as strong as the 49ers.
“We can know exactly what they’re going to do, because they don't do too much, and they're still really, really tough to go against just because they're so talented,” Schottenheimer said. “We’ll definitely talk to Trey. He knows a lot of the pieces going against them in practice, but it doesn’t always help, as we learned yesterday.”
Although the Cowboys and 49ers played twice in the playoffs in the past two years, this will be the first time they meet in the regular season since 2020. It is also a meeting between two teams in the NFL at the top of Super Bowl contention.
