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Gavin Patrick
BY GAVIN PATRICK
Sports Editor
Everything Jerry Jones could have wanted played out beneath his private luxury suite on Sunday night.
From the savory drama of Micah Parsons’ return, the back-and-forth speculation of two storied franchises, high-flying offenses having their will, the millions of fans who stayed watching past their bedtime, the cutaways to Jones himself—and despite the team’s 1-2 record and dismal showing against the Chicago Bears a week prior—all eyes were on the Dallas Cowboys.
The months of discourse surrounding Parsons’ failed contract talks with Jones and his subsequent sendoff to the Green Bay Packers were going to be settled, for now, on the gridiron. Parsons came dressed for revenge, with a Super-Bowl-contending team on his side, and Jones brought his usual antics that most Cowboy fans should have tuned out by now.
It was Cowboys vs. Packers. But for storyline purposes, it was Micah vs. Jerry. And one side was going to go home victorious—
Oh, wait, it was a tie.
We’re now a week removed from the 80-point standoff at AT&T Stadium, and fans and players alike still don’t know how to feel about it. This was supposed to be the game Parsons or Jones could boast as proof that one side was doing better than the other. It was built as the game of the year for NBC, just for that dynamic alone.
All night, it looked like we were heading for a rousing finish, but when Jordan Love’s throw to the end zone in overtime hit the back of a Cowboy defender and flopped to the ground with one second remaining, all parties involved shared a collective “blah.”
Like the game, I guess that intro was for nothing.
To say the Parsons/Jones grudge match, and everything surrounding it, was out of the ordinary— and even unnecessary—is just scratching the surface. Put your feet up, Cowboy fans, because there’s so much to unpack.
What is Jerry Jones doing?
About 35 minutes before kickoff, at 6:45 p.m. CST, it would have been normal to expect Jerry Jones to be up in the owner’s box, chatting with his sons or getting his head straight ahead of the Cowboys’ biggest spotlight game of the season. What else would he be doing as owner, president and general manager of a $13 billion organization?
Actually, he was on the set of Football Night in America to discuss what he thinks is the second coming of the Herschel Walker trade.
“[Micah] got caught up in the numbers with me,” Jones said. “I wanted the numbers of players that a player like Micah Parsons could get for us in the future.”
Now, I’m only 20 years of age, so maybe there is a reason for this I’m not aware of. But never in my life have I seen the owner of a professional sports team come on a pregame show ahead of his team’s game to boast about his business acumen, in contradiction to what most believe on the outside. Nor should this ever be necessary.
Jones certainly isn't insecure in his job. In fact, if he weren’t his own boss, he’d probably be fired as general manager if the Cowboys crumble without Parsons. There’s no reason for him to argue his side of the trade at this stage (again). But he wasn’t finished.
When the game was about to start, after the Sunday Night Football theme song, NBC rolled a pre-produced intro, telling the tale of Parsons’ return. And there he was again.
“If I could say one thing to Micah Parsons before the game, it would be that, number one, I know how we feel about each other and how much I respect him and what a great player that I think he is,” Jones said. “My expectation for him [is] to go out there and make some very significant plays. He’ll do that, you know.”
Yeah, we know.
If only he could trade the assets he got in that deal for a player like Micah Parsons.
Not only is Jones chasing the spotlight harder than ever, he’s also overseeing one of the most poorly managed transactional stretches a modern GM could produce.
Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb and Parsons were all up for new deals within the past year, meaning they entered the offseason with one year remaining on their contract. That’s how Jones saw it: The deal gets done when the old one is set to expire. That’s not how the best teams negotiate nowadays.
Take the Cowboys’ hated rival, the Philadelphia Eagles, for example. They extended their star wide receiver, Devonta Smith, in April 2024 when he was contractually tied to the team for two more seasons (the final year of his rookie deal, plus the fifth-year option). They also extended A.J. Brown two weeks later when he was just two years into the 4-year, $100 million deal he signed in 2022.
These players had clearly earned more money before their contracts were up. The only reason the Eagles would have been hesitant to extend them later on is if they had suffered a catastrophic injury or significantly regressed in performance. Football is a fickle sport, but in all likelihood, that wasn’t going to happen. So, GM Howie Roseman got ahead of the curve, secured his players and saved the team money in the future, because with the rising salary cap, players only get more expensive with time.
There are so many examples of this business tactic across the NFL right now, but not in Dallas. The small risk of Prescott, Lamb or Parsons getting badly injured or playing worse was enough to keep Jones in the past. If he had added to the ill-timed deals he gave Prescott and Lamb by extending Parsons in August, Jones would have cost his team roughly $100 million.
To make Jones look even more foolish (it’s quite easy), Parsons is on record saying he didn’t care about being the highest-paid defensive player in an interview with ESPN’s Todd Archer last December.
“I don’t think there’s a big difference between 30 and 40 million [dollars],” Parsons said, citing his financial contentment and the need to leave money for other players.
I get it, he’s 82. But those old ears couldn’t hear that?
That should be a GM’s dream, hearing that a player is willing to take less money. But Jones isn’t a general manager. He’s a showman, and the longer he waits to extend his stars, the more attention he brings to the Dallas Cowboys. That’s the thing he really dreams about.
As a Cowboys fan, I sided with Parsons for wanting out. And I’m happy he landed in Green Bay, where he doesn’t have to deal with an owner who isn’t serious about winning.
As immature as some fans think Parsons is with the podcasting and occasional tone-deaf comments, he was right on this one. In fact, in the Todd Archer interview, he sounds like a better businessman than Jerry. Perhaps he didn’t need the agent to help negotiate after all.
The Parsons trade and Herschel Walker trade are from two different planets.
The Herschel Walker trade is, of course, the move that put Jerry Jones on the map in the football universe and helped kickstart the Cowboys’ dynastic run in the 1990s. Jones has been comparing the Walker deal to the Parsons deal from the second he pulled the trigger as a crutch for otherwise incoherent reasoning. Let’s see how wrong he is this time.
In October 1989, Jones traded Walker (the team’s best player at the time) and four draft picks to the Minnesota Vikings in exchange for five players and three draft picks (a first, second and sixth). But if Dallas decided to cut or trade any of the players, they would receive an additional draft pick for each. Jones cut ties with all five players, to the Vikings’ surprise, and got two more first-round picks, two more second-round picks and a third-round pick.
I know I’ve been dogging Jerry for a minute, but we shouldn’t forget how genius a trade that was. It’s why he’s in the Hall of Fame. But to compare the Herschel trade to what he did with Micah is like comparing home cooking to microwave pizza: one takes a lot more effort and patience than the other.
Jones maximized the value for Herschel Walker like no GM has ever done in the history of sports. If he really believes he got maximum value for Micah Parsons, he might as well have never been a general manager before (which, as I said earlier, he really isn’t).
Jones had already put himself in a situation where he would’ve had to pay Parsons so much money that it would have tied roughly 50% of the Cowboys’ salary cap to three players (him, Prescott and Lamb). Everyone and their mama knows that isn’t smart business, but Jones had a way out of this. His plan was to take both sides to the brink by accentuating the number one thing that should never be a part of contract negotiations:
Feelings.
Back in March (in case you forgot), Parsons met with Jones for a private conversation about “leadership” following the Cowboys’ disappointing 2024 season. The meeting turned into Jones negotiating the terms for Parsons’ next contract. By the end of the meeting, Jones thought he had an agreement with Parsons in place – through a handshake and eye contact.
Psst, it’s not the ‘90s anymore.
Parsons was upset by this for two reasons. Number one, the conversation wasn’t what he was told it would be. Number two, perhaps most importantly, his agent wasn’t a part of the discussion.
(I should put this in ‘90s terms so Jerry can understand.) David Mulugheta is one of the most esteemed sports agents in the business. He’s like the present-day Jerry Maguire. Parsons wasn’t going to let that guy be left out of the richest contract for a defensive player in NFL history.
But Jones was butthurt that Micah didn’t fall for his (nowadays) twisted way of doing business. He refused to engage in a real negotiation from that point on, so Parsons asked for a trade. The relationship became irreconcilable.
Now, a humble man would have put that personal tension to the side, let Parsons play out the last year of his deal and open the floodgates for a trade in March 2026, when value would have been at its highest. But Jones couldn’t accept the feeling that he “lost” the negotiation and had to get rid of Parsons as soon as possible – but wait long enough so the situation stayed a hot topic of discussion, which it did.
Where’s the forehead slap emoji?
This reminds me of how things ended with Jimmy Johnson. Johnson had a personal fallout with Jones as well but could've remained the coach of the Cowboys longer if Jones hadn’t burst like a bubble. Robert Kraft put up with Bill Belichick for 24 years – because he was really serious about winning, not because he always liked the guy.
Again, it's not the ‘90s anymore. This is a vastly different era of football that Jones hasn’t and will never fully catch up to. Comparing the Parsons trade to Herschel Walker is delusional, tone-deaf and not even factual.
We haven’t seen the compensation take full effect, yet, as Dallas holds an additional first-round pick in 2026 and 2027 from the deal. But chances are Jones won’t find two All-Pros, this time around, to pair with the greatest run defender of all time (I’m joking) and turn the Cowboys back into Super Bowl contenders.
I do wish it were the ‘90s.
The tie is poetic justice
It’s only fitting that the game itself be discussed last, because the off-field activity is so much more telling of who the Cowboys are as an organization and why their on-field product suffers. Moreover, they looked like they were a very particular defensive piece away from beating the Packers.
The Packers-Cowboys game was one of the most anticipated games of the NFL season, not because anyone thought the Cowboys had a chance to win. The D in Big D stands for (no) defense, as the unit ranks bottom in the league in most meaningful statistics. Parsons couldn’t have made up for it all, but he was the difference between a Cowboys win and the tie.
Dak Prescott was playing one of the best games of his career against the vaunted Packers defense (31/40, 319 yards, three touchdowns). In overtime, he had the Cowboys at 2nd & Goal from the 4-yard line. He scrambled out to his left and had a chance to dive in for the score, but Parsons chased him down for no gain. That was his only solo tackle of the game, and Dallas ended the drive with a field goal.
Prescott proved to be the better quarterback this game, because Jordan Love proceeded to make the biggest blunder in AT&T Stadium since the infamous ball spot botch. With 0:28 left and no timeouts, Love kept the ball inbounds with a throw to Emanuel Wilson in the flat, and the Packers ran out of time for a winning touchdown (because, let’s face it, that defense wasn’t stopping anyone). Thus, a game filled with such high drama and over delivery, ended in the most anticlimactic way possible.
It didn't feel right. You’d think a soap opera would have a resolution. But this wasn’t the season finale.
Many people see the tie as a moral victory for the Cowboys, because they didn’t get run out of the stadium and came one second away from winning. Two thoughts: One, there are no moral victories in football. Two, remember this is the same team that got blown out by a 0-2 Bears squad. It’s a week-to-week league, and with their offense and defense on opposite ends of the spectrum, perhaps no team will be more inconsistent this year than the Dallas Cowboys.
Also, Jones didn’t deserve to feel the satisfaction of a win over Parsons’ Packers. The end-of-game sequence was poetic justice. When Love’s final pass hit the turf, Jones jumped for joy in the owner’s box, thinking the clock had struck zero. He’d been stirring all game with hope that he could tell the tale of his big win and team-building genius to every microphone that came his way.
Now, he had to think about firing the game clock operator. But that guy was right, and Jones is not.
That swing felt like karma to me. It’s also indicative of prior letdowns that Cowboy fans have been accustomed to for 30 years. It shows that the Cowboys are an emotional team, run by an emotional owner.
The only tears, though, came from the Packers’ side, because they should have beaten those frauds.
I know the game didn’t end how anyone wanted, but it wasn’t all for not. It showed that there are still many episodes to come in the Micah/Jerry reality series (#1 on Peacock sounds right). The Packers will be in contention for a Super Bowl in 2025, and the Cowboys will be lucky to earn a wild card spot.
There used to be a time when all the stars would come to the Dallas Cowboys. Now, they’re being shipped out of Dallas because the owner can’t run a modern football team. He runs a circus, with all eyes on him. And he’s not even attractive.
That’s show business for you.
Jerry’s Version.
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