For more than a decade, Jerry Jones has kept upping the ante on his favorite self-proclaimed desperation. There was no amount of money the Dallas Cowboys owner wouldn’t pay to win a Super Bowl. The size of that check would be embarrassing. It would be obscene. If cash guaranteed it, he’d give up “two-thirds, or a third, whatever percentage” of the franchise’s valuation.
He’d say it with tears in his eyes or a sly grin on his face, all to convince an audience of one or assure a Netflix viewership of millions — or maybe just sell the dream to himself.
Advertisement
“I’d do anything known to man to win a Super Bowl,” Jones once said. “That’s a fact.”
On Thursday, it became a myth.
Jones traded one of the best players he’s ever laid eyes on — 26-year-old edge rusher and perennial Defensive Player of the Year candidate Micah Parsons — to the Green Bay Packers. In return, he got two first-round picks that will likely to be in the bottom half of the draft order, a starting defensive tackle in Kenny Clark, who will turn 30 in five weeks, and the right to not pay Parsons a record-setting contract for a defensive player.
[Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Football league for the 2025 NFL season]
When you remove the money that will be paid to Parsons, it’s the kind of talent exchange you’d call embarrassing and obscene. The Packers made the franchise’s best defensive acquisition since signing Reggie White in 1993. This is saying something, considering Green Bay once plucked away cornerback Charles Woodson from the Oakland Raiders in free agency in 2006, and Woodson went on to win a Super Bowl, a Defensive Player of Year award and cemented his Hall of Fame bust while playing for the Packers.
Advertisement
The difference here: Parsons is nearly four years younger and has considerably less off-field baggage than Woodson when the Packers signed him. And unlike Woodson, offenses can’t simply stay away from Parsons, who will be able to impact nearly every snap. Sort of like, well, Reggie White.
Micah Parsons, right, didn’t get the big payday from the Cowboys unlike CeeDee Lamb. (Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images)
(Richard Rodriguez via Getty Images)
Money isn’t a good excuse for this deal
But the money, right? It’s not just the two first-round draft picks and an aging defensive tackle the Packers are giving up. They’re also surrendering a reported four-year, $188 million deal, with $136 million in guarantees. That $47 million per season average isn’t just quarterback money — it’s top-12 money league-wide, with only 11 quarterbacks making more than Parsons. It’s the kind of deal where Parsons can’t just be great. Instead, he has to be a DPOY candidate every one of the next four seasons.
Advertisement
Of course, that’s what he would have been paid to do in Dallas, too, if the Cowboys had done what Jones said they were prepared to do contractually last April — a deal that, despite the details not being public, would have also made Parsons the highest-paid non-quarterback in NFL history. To do that, Dallas would have needed to exceed the contract signed by Pittsburgh Steelers pass rusher T.J. Watt, who landed a three-year, $123 million pact with $108 million guaranteed. In theory, if Dallas exceeded the Watt deal by only $1 in salary and guarantees, and also gave Parsons only a three-year deal, it would have been a difference of $6 million per season in annual average value and $13 million in guaranteed money. That means the Cowboys would have had to annually sacrifice a player on their roster similar to veteran rotational edge defender Dante Fowler Jr., who is 31 and signed to a one-year, $6 million deal.
Is that overly simplified math and team-building? Of course it is. There are a lot of ways to look at the salary opened up by Parsons not being on the roster. But there are also a lot of ways to look at what the Cowboys’ defense will be without him. And there is no selling that the defense will somehow be at an advantage since Clark is a run-plugger and the first-round picks can be spent … looking for another Parsons? Or maybe a cheaper facsimile.
The reality is what Dallas did Thursday is not an illustration of doing “anything known to man” to win a Super Bowl. It’s not even close. Because we’ve seen other teams do much closer to “anything known to man” and actually accomplish their goal of winning a title in the process.
Los Angeles Rams general manager Les Snead torched SEVEN straight first-round draft picks and then leaned in when head coach Sean McVay wanted to kick quarterback Jared Goff to the curb in 2021. At the time, Goff was one of the highest-paid players in the league and required burning up more than $22.1 million of dead cap in a season, an NFL record for a player at that time. The Rams also did it knowing they would then have to commit another lucrative quarterback contract extension to newly acquired QB Matthew Stafford one season later.
Advertisement
This is what it looks like when you’re close to doing “anything known to man” to win a Super Bowl. And the Rams did.
Not that the Cowboys would even need to look outside of their own division to recognize overwhelming risk, effort and money in the face of wanting to win at all costs. They could look at the Philadelphia Eagles, who ditched quarterback Carson Wentz at sizable cap expense, parted company with Super Bowl-winning head coach Doug Pederson (just three years after he won it all), traded for wideout A.J. Brown — and then started paying practically everybody on the roster who was any good. All the while, the surrounding NFL looked at the Eagles and kept clucking their tongues and talking about how Philadelphia general manager Howie Roseman was sending the franchise straight into rocky salary cap waters.
To wit, this quote from Cowboys co-owner Stephen Jones last December, speaking to the team’s flagship radio station, 105.3 The Fan: “Everybody has their different battles with the cap that hit at different times. You know, Philly will have theirs coming up, where they’ll have to make tough decisions.”
Advertisement
The Eagles won the Super Bowl roughly six weeks later. And in free agency, the Eagles had to let go of a handful of good players who contributed to that championship. But the point is, the Eagles and Roseman went for it. Knowing they “only had so much pie” (one of Stephen Jones’ favorite phrases) when it came to the salary cap, they gave away too much — knowing they’d have to cut good players later. The point of giving away too much of the pie was to actually make the most of the Super Bowl shot available. They’d pay the piper later.
How are Cowboys selling this to fans?
Again, this is what teams do when they’re trying to do “anything known to man” to win a Super Bowl. They cut ties with quarterbacks to make whatever upgrades are necessary at the position. They burn through first-round picks. They grind the draft hard because they know most of their cap is going to be tied up in a few players and they’re going to need a lot of cheap replacements. Sometimes, they even rework contracts and kick money down the road, just so they can keep players and maximize a Super Bowl window.
The Cowboys have done some of these things, but never to the limit that they were approached with this offseason. For the first time in a while, they were faced with looking at an ultra elite player and having to make it work in a way that was going to make them very uncomfortable.
Advertisement
Part of it was salary, due to the staggering amount of money that would be tied up in quarterback Dak Prescott ($60 million AAV) and wideout CeeDee Lamb ($34 million AAV). And part of it was having to engage with Parsons’ agent, David Mulugheta, who was most certainly going to try and maximize his client’s deal — the same way Prescott and Lamb’s representatives did. It was a reality that, without a doubt, led Jerry Jones to try and do the deal with Parsons directly because that was the best path to a cheaper-than-market contract.
Now, because of money and pride and not wanting to compromise the pie for years to come, the Cowboys sent arguably their most dynamic player — and quite literally their best player — to a Packers franchise that has historically been a conference rival and is now built to make a Super Bowl push this season. It’s the same Packers team that essentially left Jones in tears in the 2023 season’s playoffs, when it dismantled one of the most Super Bowl-worthy Cowboys teams in the past two decades.
They’ll sell it as a football remedy because they couldn’t stop the run last season, which Jones repeated often in Thursday’s news conference.
They’ll sell it as a financial remedy because they have to keep getting ahead of Prescott’s contract.
Advertisement
They’ll even sell it as a plan that they’ve been thinking about for some time, with Jerry Jones referencing a Herschel Walker deal that netted much more than two (likely late) first-round picks and a 30-year-old defensive tackle. But lest we forget, that Dallas franchise — the one that dealt away Walker — had a Super Bowl window that was as dead as Julius Caesar.
And maybe that’s these Cowboys, too. Because trading away Parsons for draft picks and an aging starter looks more like the start of a reboot than it does maximizing a Super Bowl path that’s supposed to be accessible right now.
For a team owner who talks about his clock ticking to win one more championship, this is not the “anything known to man” move that he’s been professing for more than a decade. And that is a fact.
Read the full article here
