Sports Illustrated ranked the Dallas Cowboys among the NFL's top offseason moves for 2026, which means the league's most valuable franchise, $10.3 billion on the Forbes 2025 list, has been assessed as improving in consecutive Junes while its Super Bowl tally since 1995 remains zero. Offensive coordinator Brian Adams turned down approaches from at least two other clubs, per The Dallas Morning News. The draft class graded out well. These are all accurate. They are also the correct things to say about the Cowboys if you are a publication that needs the Cowboys to keep returning your calls.

Vivian pulled the NFL franchise-valuation data going back to 2010 and sent it over with a note: "check the R-squared on winning." She was right. The correlation between playoff performance and franchise-value appreciation across NFL clubs over the last sixteen seasons is close to zero. Not a scandal; a design feature. Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys for $140 million in 1989, and the media-rights bundle signed with CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN/ABC, and Amazon in 2021 will deliver the league roughly $113 billion through 2033. The NFL voted to allow private-equity minority ownership in August 2024, and the franchise-valuation architecture, not the win-loss record, is what Gulf sovereign funds and Singapore family offices priced when they started sending term sheets. Adams' contract runs through the 2027 season. The next date that matters for Dallas's competitive picture is the March 2027 franchise-tag window, when Jones will have to decide whether he is managing a championship program or, as thirty years of compounding suggests, a media-and-real-estate enterprise that also fields a football team.