Brian Schottenheimer: Osa Odighizuwa and I "wept" when he was traded

As the Cowboys make a change to their defense, they needed to tweak the personnel to fit the adjusted front. That effort has included a trade that sent defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa to San Francisco.

It wasn't easy, for the player or his head coach, Brian Schottenheimer.

"Anytime you go through a scheme change, there's going to be adjustments where you move on from an incredible person, an incredible leader in Osa," Schottenheimer said this week at the NFL's annual meeting in Arizona. "That was one of the hard ones. I'm happy to share with you guys: I wept, we both wept on the phone together. It was hard. That's the nature of the business, and I'm thrilled that he's going to a place that is a great fit for him."

This is one of the realities that get overlooked by media who view trades as all-caps, exclamation point-worthy proclamations. For every goofy "TRADE!" tweet we see, there's a human being who may not be thrilled about the sudden change in his overall work and life circumstances.

Odighizuwa, who has spent five years with the Cowboys, had no reason to want to leave. Especially with no state income taxes in Texas and a whopping 13.3 percent in California.

But that's one of the realities of playing in the NFL. Absent a no-trade clause, any player can be traded. Whether he wants to be or not.

Every player is a piece in a football machine that will eventually replace each of them with a new part. And "the best interests of the team" always control those decisions.

The best interests of the player are secondary, at best. For most teams, the best interests of the player don't even matter.

Especially when the team decides it's ready to move on from the player.