Super Bowl ring holder and the Philadelphia Eagles legend DeSean Jackson was a hater of the Dallas Cowboys, but it seems like after all these years and after his ugly Eagles exit, he wanted to be a Cowboy at last.

“I was a free agent, and like, I’m not going to sit here and lie to you. I’d be like, ‘Man, like it would have been cool to play for America’s team,'” Jackson told Adam Tabatchnick on the Caps Off podcast. “Quote unquote, like you got to think like the stadium; they had that nice a** stadium. Like I would love going to play in that stadium.”

Jackson, who was picked 49th overall by the Eagles in the 2008 NFL Draft, was a wide receiver and a punt returner who had three Pro Bowl seasons with the Eagles. Although he hated the Cowboys, he always admired AT&T Stadium and was fond of the Cowboys’ owner and general manager, Jerry Jones, whom he says is “one of the coolest owners of all time.”

Another thing that Jackson liked about the Cowboys and wanted to be one of them was just because “they’re one of the most talked about teams.” Jackson says that the Cowboys are “always on TV.” While he never played for the Cowboys, the team always had to face challenges when facing him during games.

The Cowboys’ official website also released an article especially about him in December 2015, about how difficult he was to deal with, with then Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett saying that “he’s a big-play guy,” remembering the number of times the Cowboys had faced him, whether in Philadelphia or when he was with the Washington Redskins.

So not only Jackson, but the Cowboys themselves were very fond of him, though no deal ever materialized even after his controversial exit from his favorite team, the Eagles. In 2014, Jackson was cut by then-Eagles coach Chip Kelly, and he opened up about his side of the story recently on AP’s “Football Unfiltered” podcast with Rob Maaddi.

“I just feel like there was a lot of things that was made up,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of allegations. I’ve never been a felon, never got arrested, never gotten in any trouble. So to kind of knock me for the areas I came from and the people I hung out with, kind of just. … just be true. I just wish it was just the truth. And I think the truth was they just wanted to move on, and that’s okay.”

He got released after his name got involved with reputed Los Angeles gang members. But Kelly at the time said they “just wanted to go in a different direction,” and it had “nothing to do with any article. Purely football.”

The article Kelly talked about was published by NJ.com, which first reported on his ties to those questionable entities. Despite Kelly clarifying the reason, Jackson didn’t seem to be satisfied with it.

“Sometimes things happen like that. You have coaches that may not get along or you have coaches that may not like certain things that a player may do. But for me, it was just more like a story been made up about something and just coming clean and just saying, ‘You know what? We just want to move in a different direction.'”

Jackson also talked about the incident on the Dan Patrick Show, saying that he just wanted some respect when he was being released. Instead, he said they were questioning “how my upbringing was, and where I grew up at,” which Jackson said made it “seem like I was a villain or a bad person in society, like that really made me feel a way.”

“I wish I could have stayed in Philly my whole career, man. I played for Philadelphia, but at the end of the day, I had to go other places,” Jackson told Maaddi this October.

In his career, besides playing with the Eagles, he played for Washington, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas before playing his last season with Baltimore. A Prime Video documentary, “Go Deep: The DeSean Jackson Story,” also discusses this incident and his journey since childhood, with the tapes recorded by his elder brother, Byron Jackson.

What was surely already a fulfilling NFL story could’ve taken a different turn if Jackson had joined the Cowboys at some point in his career, but we guess this one will now sit on the shelf of “football fantasy storylines.”