So as the year-plus saga over his big second contract dragged through 2024 and into 2025, and as every move he made was chronicled, his every move was also calculated. Or, at least, that’s how those within the Cowboys’ organization and others who know him took it.
The first thing most folks do in the aftermath of a mega-trade like the one that went down Thursday—sending Parsons from America’s Team to the Packers in exchange for two first-round picks and DT Kenny Clark—is assign blame. Certainly, both the Cowboys, all the way up to ownership, and Parsons played roles in the conclusion everyone came to, one week before Dallas’s opener in Philadelphia. You could see, in real time, reflection over that.
But what I don’t think you’ll see next is either side, at least for the time being, thinking this was all some mistake. The Cowboys’ handling of the negotiation, for better or worse, followed a pattern of Dallas’s last few big ones. And everything on Parsons’s end—from his disinterested demeanor in sweats on the sidelines at camp, to carrying nachos into AT&T Stadium, then laying on a training table in-game last Thursday—was taken as intentional.
Which, again, comes back to who the 26-year-old Parsons is. He’s incredibly intelligent and savvy, and understands the era he’s living in. So you’ll have trouble finding anyone that’s been around him who thinks any of what we saw the past two months, as the temperature got turned up on the negotiation, was accidental. Simply put, Parsons is too smart for that.
Of course, that Dallas ended up willing to move him says a lot about where the Cowboys were and, in particular, where owner Jerry Jones was, too.
Let’s dive into all of that now …
• As we said, the pacing of this negotiation wasn’t wholly dissimilar from what we all witnessed with Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb last year, or even Zack Martin the year before that. Once the team arrived in California for camp in 2023 and ’24, their negotiations were put on the back burner, the same way Parsons’s were this summer. Basically sending the message that if a deal isn’t done that works for the team early, the player has to wait.
That said, there is a difference between this negotiation and the previous three. Martin, Lamb and Prescott are/were very popular in the locker room. That’s not the case with Parsons, who has rankled teammates in different ways, seen by some as egotistical and self-centered. His podcast has created issues, too, that go all the way up to quarterback Dak Prescott.
• Some of it spilled into Parsons’s play. Previous defensive staffs had trouble with him at times because he would play out of structure in an effort to make big plays, which led to the run-defense issues Jerry and Stephen Jones kept referencing at their press conference.
That does happen with great pass rushers—it was just too common with Parsons and, again, he was too smart a football player for these to be a string of honest mistakes. Was it worth it for the game-changing plays he made? Yes, it was. Again, this sort of problem with a pass rusher wasn’t the first one a coaching staff had to confront. Also, Dallas was clearly willing to do that with its initial offer to Parsons in April.
But when things broke down in that phase of the negotiation, bigger-picture questions were asked.
• The Cowboys’ offer, made by Jones to Parsons himself in April, as the owner detailed at his press conference, topped $40 million per year, but ended up being too long for the Parsons’s camp’s liking. Dallas has been down this road before with guys, trying to get them to do five- and six-year extensions to give the team a heavy measure of control through changing conditions in the market. Parsons walking away from the offer changed the dynamic.
Dallas went from a sign-your-star-player approach to contemplating bigger-picture questions on how a team should be assembled, with Prescott and Lamb already on massive deals, after so much frustration over how recent seasons ended. Which got things to the point where this became as much about how Dallas was doing business as Parsons himself.
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