It is starting to feel Not Good as far as things between the Cowboys and Micah Parsons are concerned.
We are now closer to the Dallas Cowboys beginning their season than we are to Micah Parsons’ public trade request from the team. Monday marked Hump Day in that regard (the middle point) and we are now officially over it and headed downhill.
Maybe in more ways than one.
On Monday it was noted by ESPN’s Adam Schefter that there was no reason to think that the Cowboys and Parsons will get a deal done before the season opener on September 4th. You never want to hear that kind of thing, but those sorts of statements were made about Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb in certain respects last year so it didn’t exactly cause panic.
It may not be time to hit the actual button, but we might need to lift the glass casing that surrounds it. Schefter offered another note on this saga on Tuesday and it was caught by Bobby Belt of 105.3 The Fan. Schefter said that it sounds like the Cowboys and Parsons are headed for a divorce “at some time.”
This is an admittedly ambiguous statement and likely a hedge of sorts from Schefter in the event that a deal ultimately gets done. While we could read into the “at some time” in a very literal way, it seems that the implication here is that the Cowboys and Parsons could ride out the 2025 season as is (with Parsons on the final year of his rookie contract) and set up a world for more negotiations next year with the franchise tag as an option.
Dallas could go as far as tagging Parsons a second time in 2027 if they so chose (the path the franchise went with Dak Prescott during his first extension negotiations) which is the leverage that the team has. They have some years of unavoidable team control over Parsons in a contractual sense.
This is where things have begun to veer off into a different path than Prescott or Lamb took last year, as Belt also noted. People keep saying things about how this negotiation “feels different” but we are now at a place where actual different language has been used.
Leverage is a funny word with stuff like this, and while the Cowboys hold some cards as mentioned, Parsons is also an incredible football player. Consider what franchise icon Troy Aikman said about Parsons’ own leverage during Monday night’s preseason game that he was calling.
This is obviously a game of chicken involving inordinate sums of money. If a deal is reached it is going to require somebody, maybe even both parties, to bend on whatever their demands are at this moment in time. That is how negotiations work.
For what it’s worth we have heard from Jerry Jones and Stephen Jones a lot on this front, but Tuesday brought with it some thoughts from Charlotte Jones as well. Charlotte was on Good Morning Football promoting the new Netflix documentary that was released about the Cowboys and was asked about the Parsons situation and why this (contractual drama with the team’s biggest superstars) seems to happen all of the time.
“It does happen all of the time. And again I think that’s a testament to people’s interest. That whatever we are doing… there are other contract holdouts across the league. Everyone deals with the same issue. We just happen to be on this stage of interest that is more magnified than most.”
“So every little hiccup, every little sneeze is blown up and blown out of proportion and discussed at a level that is probably beyond where most teams experience it.”
“For me as I sit back and look at it. I think we’ve developed, over time, the ability to kind of tune out the noise and just focus on the issue at hand.”
“Obviously everybody wants this to be over with. Everybody wants to just play the game. But there is a part of this that is unavoidable and that’s with any kind of contract negotiation.”
“And I do think that… we have this incredible roster of talent. They’re at a very high level. They are being compensated at a very high level. And at the end of the day you realize that when the pie is gone there’s nothing left. So how you spread that around all of the talent that you have, and at some point that becomes the iceberg that’s right there that is… creates the tension in how you divvy that up.”
“I think it’s just part of the game. I think it’s the business part of the game that fans don’t enjoy. But the ability to feed in and want to be, everybody wants to be a Monday morning quarterback, but they also want to be a Monday morning GM. And they know everything. This is part of it. This is life. This is life in the NFL.”
It had been a very long time since a member of the Jones family, aka a front office member, used the pie analogy in a public setting like this. Charlotte being the one to do it next was hardly on anybody’s bingo card.
Category: General Sports
