Cowboys won't learn from the Micah Parsons debacle because Jerry Jones doesn't want to learn from it

The Dallas Cowboys do things differently than every other team in the NFL. They also think that they do things the right way and that everyone else is wrong. They tell people this with both their words and their actions at just about every opportunity. They are extremely arrogant about it -- and they are also wrong. 

That's a dangerous combination, and we saw it culminate on Thursday when they traded superstar edge rusher Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers for two first-round picks and defensive tackle Kenny Clark. After a drawn-out saga that included countless shots fired in the media, a refusal to even pick up the phone and communicate with Parsons' agent, David Mulugheta, and finally an ultimatum that Parsons needed to play out his fifth-year option or else leave the team, the Cowboys decided that the best course of action was to deal away their best player. 

It never had to be this way. Parsons was eligible for a contract extension last offseason, at which point the Cowboys could have made him the highest-paid non-quarterback in history if they'd paid him $34,000,001 per year -- or $1 more than what Nick Bosa was paid on his deal. Instead, they waited until players like Justin Jefferson, Maxx Crosby, Ja'Marr Chase, Myles Garrett and T.J. Watt reset that market several times over, so that the going rate for Parsons started about $8 million higher than that. 

As we've written previously, the Cowboys had done this before -- once with CeeDee Lamb and twice with Dak Prescott.

When Prescott was first eligible for an extension back in 2019, it was very obvious that whatever his new deal was, would pay him more than any quarterback in history. Once you reach a certain level of competence, that is just what happens in quarterback contracts. But the Cowboys delayed signing and let guys like Jared Goff and Carson Wentz and Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers sign new deals before getting Prescott to put pen to paper, and cost themselves at least $10 million per year in doing so. ...

Amazingly, the Cowboys did it again with Prescott over the last few years. Had they signed him to an extension in 2023, before players like Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, Justin Herbert and Joe Burrow got their deals done, it's possible they could have gotten Prescott for around $52 or 53 million per year -- or even less. At the time, the top quarterback contract was worth $50.3 million per season. 

Instead, they waited and allowed not just Hurts, Jackson, Herbert and Burrow to sign new deals, but also Goff (again) Tua Tagovailoa, Trevor Lawrence and Jordan Love to do the same. All of a sudden, the top of the market was $55 million per year, and Prescott was obviously going to blow that out of the water thanks to the leverage he accumulated during the previous disastrous negotiation. He got $60 million per year, which remains $5 million more than anyone else has signed for. ... 

They also could have paid Lamb after his own third season, when he was coming off a second-team All-Pro berth rather than a year when he led the NFL in catches and made first-team All-Pro, and rightly decided that he wasn't going to sign a new contract until after he saw how much Jefferson got paid. He eventually signed for $1 million less per year than Jefferson, which was more than fair. But if the Cowboys had merely blown the highest-paid receiver contract out of the water the year before, they might have been able to get him for around $30 million per year. (The previous high was $28 million.) Again, they cost themselves a bunch of money by waiting.

If the Cowboys had simply taken Parsons and Mulugheta up on their offer to negotiate a new contract after his third season rather than waiting until after his fourth, this whole mess could have been avoided because Parsons would already have been under contract for the long term. They had several examples handy of why that would have benefitted them from both a relationship and salary-cap perspective, and yet they refused to change the way they do business. Instead, Jerry Jones tried to wait things out and negotiate with a player by circumventing his agent in order to get a better deal, then essentially threw a public tantrum when the player didn't let Jerry get one over on him.

Even now, Jones says that he has no regrets about the way things went down. He said in his post-trade press conference that there's "nothing at all" he'd do differently with how he handled the entire Parsons situation. 

He is not going to learn from how this played out because he doesn't want to learn. He thinks the Cowboys do things the right way and that other teams that get out in front of their contract negotiations with their best players, then aggressively manage the cap so that they can fit those stars on their books while acquiring still more star players, do things the wrong way, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Jones is, predictably, trying to spin this as a good move for the Cowboys in both on the field and on the cap sheet. "In our judgment, this gives us a better chance to be a better team than we have been the last several years," Jones said.

He couldn't be more wrong on that count. As ESPN's Bill Barnwell noted, the Cowboys were, by EPA per play, the NFL's single-best defense in the snaps where Parsons was on the field during his four-year run in Dallas. In the snaps where he was off the field during that same span, Dallas ranked dead last in EPA per play.

Micah Parsons should have been a Cowboys lifer. Instead, he's Jerry and Stephen Jones' warning shot

Garrett Podell

Will they get better against the run with Clark on their roster? Probably. At his peak, he was an elite run defender. These days, he's a pretty good one -- but certainly better than the rest of the defensive tackles Dallas has on its roster. Still, Clark isn't a run defense unto himself. The Cowboys are still weak against the run elsewhere on the roster, and Clark even at his peak played only around 80% of the defensive snaps. Last year, that number dipped to 63%. If the trend continues, he may not even be out there enough to make a significant difference.

And the trade-off for possibly being better against the run will almost surely be being significantly worse against the pass. The Cowboys do have edge-rush depth with Dante Fowler Jr., Sam Williams, Marshawn Kneeland and second-round pick Donovan Ezeiruaku, but Fowler has just two career seasons with double-digit sacks, Williams and Kneeland are coming off significant injuries and Ezeiruaku is still a second-round rookie. 

For a team with a questionable-at-best cornerback situation -- they have DaRon Bland but Trevon Diggs is coming off a major injury, rookie Shavon Revel is still rehabbing from an injury of his own, Bills cast-off Kaiir Elam is expected to start and recent waiver claims Reddy Steward and Trikweze Bridges seem likely to play not-insignificant roles given the various other factors -- removing possibly the best pass rusher in the NFL from the defense is a dicey proposition to say the least. 

The financial benefits the Cowboys get from the deal are also questionable, despite Jones' assertion that this will help the Cowboys immensely on that front. Dallas doesn't use its cap room aggressively enough to take advantage of any savings they'll gain by swapping out Parsons for Clark and the draft picks.

They'll pay Clark a lot less this year than they would have paid Parsons, sure, but Clark is set to count for $21.5 million against the cap in 2026 and $20 million in 2027, for what will be his age-31 and 32 seasons. None of that money is guaranteed, though, so he is likely to seek a contract extension. If the Cowboys give it to him, they'll cut significantly into their cap savings. If they don't, they'll likely be paying Clark as much or more against the cap than the Packers will pay Parsons, due to the way teams tend to structure these types of massive contract extensions. And if Clark, who is going to be 30 in early October, doesn't live up to expectations, it's entirely possible that the Cowboys cut him and will have gotten just one year out of the player they pushed for in the deal. 

And again, the Cowboys could have avoided the supposed cap crunch if they had simply done things differently with their major contracts, or with the way they manage their cap on a year-to-year basis. The Cowboys love to claim that there is only so much "pie" to go around to their players, but their division rivals put the lie to that claim.

Because the Cowboys refuse to aggressively manage their cap, for example, Dak Prescott will count for $50,518,430 against their books in 2025. Meanwhile, the Eagles will pay a combined $50,528,578 in cap charges for Jalen Hurts, DeVonta Smith, Saquon Barkley, Landon Dickerson, Zack Baun and Cam Jurgens, despite the fact that each of them is on a contract that pays at least $17 million per year, and as much as $51 million per year, via Over the Cap.

If Dallas had gotten out in front of Prescott's contract rather than waiting until the last possible minute (literally -- he signed hours before the season started last year), he wouldn't account for nearly that much space, and they wouldn't have to worry as much about what Parsons costs on a yearly basis. Other teams handle this type of stuff with relative ease. The Cowboys don't, and they refuse to change the way they go about their business. 

Jones also claimed that the Cowboys got a lot of assets out of the deal ("There was no question in our mind that Micah could bring us a lot of resources in a trade"), and again, that's misleading at best and outright gaslighting at worst. They didn't get an historic haul of draft picks here. They may not have even gotten a good haul.

The two first-round picks the Cowboys got from Green Bay should be widely expected to land late in the first round. They were already expected to be one of the best teams in the NFL, and now they're considered even more likely to be an inner-circle contender. After dealing for Parsons, the Packers now have the league's sixth-best odds to win the Super Bowl. 

If they meet expectations, they'll hand the Cowboys the 27th pick in the draft in 2026. That is a decent asset, but the default expectation for what you'll get out of a player drafted late in the first round is not anywhere near an elite player. They also have one of the youngest rosters in the NFL, so they should be expected to be just as good or even better in 2027. In all likelihood, the Cowboys are going to get two picks in the 20s. It's entirely possible that they get two picks in the 30s, if the Packers can get back to the conference championship round or make the Super Bowl. 

While Jones tried to compare the trade during his press conference to the famous Herschel Walker heist, the comparison doesn't work. Dallas received received four players, first-round picks in 1990, 1991 and 1992, second-round picks in 1990, 1991 and 1992, a third-round pick in 1992 and a sixth-round pick in 1990. This return does not come anywhere close to that. Instead, it more resembles the trade the Raiders made with the Bears wherein they sent out Khalil Mack and a second-round pick and got two first-round picks, a third-round pick and a sixth-round pick in return, but the Cowboys traded Parsons to a significantly better team. 

The ammo the Cowboys gained from this, despite proclamations elsewhere in the media, is not going to net them someone like Arch Manning unless they're bad enough to land the No. 1 overall pick themselves. But by Jones' own rationale, he thinks the Cowboys got better with this trade, so they won't be in position to draft him unless they surrender one of the most significant draft-pick hauls in history to move up. And if Manning is as good as the draft industrial complex thinks he is, nobody is going to trade away that pick to begin with. And you don't trade away a generational defender for a chance to possibly, maybe move up the board for a prospect who might not even enter the draft this year anyway.

Simply put, none of the rationales the Cowboys or their defenders have put forth holds up to any level of scrutiny, let alone the strict scrutiny that should be applied to moves like trading arguably the best defensive player in the sport. They don't know what they're doing, but they're never going to change the way they do things. They think they know better than everyone else. After 30 years of futility, you'd think that maybe they'd eventually see the light. But they don't want to.