Earlier this week, the Houston Texans signed tight end Dalton Schultz to a new three-year contract, locking in one of C.J. Stroud's top targets for the remainder of the star quarterback's rookie-scale deal. After signing Schultz on a one-year, $6.1 million pact last offseason, Houston effectively doubled his pay this time around, with a $36 million contract that contains $23.5 million in guarantees.
Upon signing the new deal, Schultz appeared on The Pat McAfee Show on ESPN and talked about, among other things, the difference between playing for the Texans and playing for the Dallas Cowboys -- the team with which he spent the first five seasons of his career.
"The focus is just football, you know what I mean?" Schultz said of playing in Houston. "I'm going back and telling some people about being around the Cowboys practice facility and game day and describing some of the interactions and stuff that you see on a day-to-day basis and it surprises a lot of people. They're like, 'Holy crap. That actually happens at a practice facility?' You think it's normal, and then you come to a place like this."
What's an example?
"It's literally a zoo, dude," Schultz said. "There's people tapping on the glass trying to get people's attention while they're doing power cleans or whatever. It's different. That's the brand that they've built, that's what [owner] Jerry Jones likes, that's the way that they run things and there's nothing wrong with that. You don't realize how many eyeballs and how much that can maybe distract in the locker room, just being in the facility until you go somewhere else and you're like, 'Holy crap, there's none of that.'"
Earlier this offseason, both Jerry and Stephen Jones insisted that the Cowboys do not have a "culture" problem; but if a former player is comparing your culture unfavorable to that of the Houston Texans, who until last year were a team considered to have one of the worst organizational cultures in the league, that seems like the kind of thing that should ping your radar. Of course, we know that nothing is going to change in Dallas. As Schultz said, Jerry likes the way things work and likes that the Cowboys are the center of attention and often a circus (or a zoo), and so that's the way they will remain.
