In the coupled pickling line and tandem cold mill (PL-TCM), the hot-rolled strip needs to be trimmed on both sides of the strip before the tandem cold rolling process to ensure stable operation of the rolling process. The equipment for trimming the strip is the side trimmer, and during trimming a failure of the side scrap blockage is often caused by the variation in the width of the hot-rolled strip and the deviation during the actual operation. For this problem, this paper established a finite element model of strip trimming by side trimmer, analyzed the influence of side scrap width, structure parameters, and strip specifications on the equivalent plastic strain at the trimmed position of the strip, and obtained the influence law of each factor during the trimming process. On this basis, by collecting the historical data of side scrap blockage failure of the side trimmer, the threshold value of the side scrap width setting is obtained. Combining the width data of the hot-rolled strip and the actual operation status monitoring of the strip in the inlet section of the PL-TCM, the side scrap blockage risk identification function and the speed reduction strategy of the side trimmer are designed to form the side scrap blockage pre-control model together. After applying the side scrap blockage pre-control model to a PL-TCM, a 40.5% reduction in side scrap blockage failures was achieved compared with the same length of time before the application, which achieved satisfactory results.