“It’s Real!” - Why Rich Is Jumping on the 2026 Dallas Cowboys’ Bandwagon

Jerry Jones has sold a lot of flimflam over the years. Rich thinks this one has meat on it.

"It's real," he said, and he has been saying it for a while. Marcus Spears agreed on Monday for the same reason Rich keeps landing on: the roster actually backs up the bluster, and this time there is no bluster.

The tell is the quiet. There is no all-in summer of the CeeDee Lamb variety, no repeat of what happened with Micah Parsons last year. Quinnen Williams got paid and it was simply done. Dak Prescott is focused. Everyone is healthy, with the appropriate knock on wood.

And Rich loves the coach, which took a minute. When Brian Schottenheimer was hired there was laughter, partly because he had never been a head coach and mostly because Bill Belichick was available. Rich listened to a full hour of a Schottenheimer press conference one weekend and came in the next day sold.

The clip that sold him this week was about Joe Milton, who balled out against Arizona.

Schottenheimer traced Milton back to Michigan, when everyone applauded how hard and how far he could throw. "Cool. That's awesome," the coach said. "Go be in a carnival somewhere. Like, that's not what playing NFL quarterback is."

Then he explained what is. Throwing through small windows, throwing over people, changing arm slots. "Arm strength is cool, but go to the fair and win a teddy bear. You got to play quarterback."

What Schottenheimer sees now is Milton doing exactly that. Checking the ball down, making blitz adjustments, solving problems, getting to a third and sometimes fourth progression. "I'm really, really proud of him."

But the moment that made the segment happened after the game, and it had nothing to do with a quarterback.

Shiaz Pete is an undrafted rookie guard out of Kentucky, third string, a Navajo player who the show believes may be the first ever in the league. The game was in Arizona. A large Native crowd came out for him, and when he got in at the end and threw a block on a touchdown, they started chanting his name.

The entire team stepped back from the bench so he could have it.

"I saw something I've never seen before," Schottenheimer told the locker room afterward. "25 years in the NFL. An entire section cheering for one man."

Then Pete spoke, and it was short.

"I am very fortunate to be amongst you and to play in the same field where the same star holding on our chest," he said. "This game, fate brought us here as strangers, but this game, this star, this team will make us brothers."

The room came apart.

Rich's point was not that camaraderie wins games. It was that you do not usually associate this with the Cowboys, and that a third-string guard whose roster odds are slim just got that moment from a team full of players fighting for their own jobs.

The desk noted the weight Pete is carrying for an entire community, and that he is accepting it rather than shrinking from it. Also, at 6-9 and 317 pounds, that if football does not work out, Tony Khan and Triple H will be calling inside of five years.

"We'll see what happens when Tom meets ball," Rich said. But something real is going on.