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Cowboys Actually Did It – Parsons Is Gone
In an unprecedented Jerry Moment, Dallas deals away their best player for flexibility.
Bob Sturm
Aug 29, 2025
They really did it. He is no longer a Dallas Cowboy.
Yes, I am pretty stunned.
A big part of this career is spending countless times admitting I got something wrong (despite being accused frequently of never admitting I ever get things wrong).
And yet again, I got this one wrong, dear readers. I clear underestimated Jerry Jones this time. Forgive me, but after covering him for 28 seasons up-close and even more from afar, I did not believe he would trade away his best player over money.
I figured, like usual, that we would see the Cowboys cave in and pay the man his money. I expected that Micah Parsons would take the field with money everywhere on September 4th in Philadelphia as the highest paid non QB in NFL history. I expected the Cowboys cap situation to be a bit of a mess for the next several years. And I expected the same basic outcomes of many Cowboys seasons to be assured to fall well short of any sort of Super Bowl scenarios, because we know how this would likely play out.
My expectations of Jerry Jones led me – and most everyone covering this story – a bit astray.
Because in the end, Jerry Jones did something that he has never done before. He made himself worse to attempt a different path forward.
=====
But, wait, that isn’t the only part of this story I got incorrect based on my priors.
I also know the Green Bay Packers intimately. I have known their organization since my birth and have tracked their movements closely and with great interest. Not 28 seasons, but roughly 50. And I know their DNA because I was raised on it. And the Green Bay Packers do not do this sort of thing. They do not leave the prudent and careful lane because they cannot afford to do so. They are never the bold and potentially reckless franchise because they can never allow emotional risks to ruin what they have carefully constructed over years. They know irrelevance in this league and realize that one false move could be all it takes.
So, I knew in my bones that the last franchise to risk everything to get someone like Micah Parsons would be the Packers. They never trade multiple draft picks of high value for a veteran player that needs more money than anyone has ever needed before.
The Packers have no “crazy owner”, so they never decide to go all-in on a hand of poker and let the draw determine whether they keep their house or not.
There is no franchise less likely to make an all-or-nothing deal like this than the Green Bay Packers. They just aren’t that kind of franchise.
=====
So, yeah. Jerry Jones acted way out of his norms and so did the other side. And for that reason, I assumed both parties were not actually going to make this deal happen.
But, yesterday, at exactly 4pm, the bomb dropped. The Cowboys really traded 26-year old Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers. And the Packers really traded two 1st round picks and Kenny Clark as well as agreed to pay Micah for his next 4-years at $188 million.
But, there is a pretty good chance you aren’t reading this today to get my feel for Green Bay’s financial situation.
So, without knowing where to begin, let’s begin.
The Cowboys traded their best player (arguably) and are worse in 2025.
This is the first and most glaring subsection. This is the one that gets today’s move linked to the trade this city made earlier this year of Luka Doncic. Those two deals are also linked because they are both once in a generation types who were born in 1999 and that Dallas citizens expected to watch their entire careers. These aren’t “face of the franchise” types only. These are potential “face of the sport” types.
Earlier this month, SturmStack’s ranking of the top 60 players in the organization had Micah Parsons in the top spot. I had him 2nd in my ballot, but I would love to share my summary of him there:
Parsons was incredible on the field. He was unstoppable. His EPA per play put the Dallas defense No. 1 when he was on the field and No. 31 when he was off of it. Think about how insane that is.
He missed a fair amount of time with a high ankle sprain in 2024 and yet he still did all of the damage on this reel below. If that was a bad year, just put him in Canton now.
He was probably annoying off the field to some. But, he was singular as a QB killer.
Micah Parsons was the biggest talent on this team and he was so young that the value of offering him to the league should have been off the charts. That is why we believe that there is merit in trading him if you think your franchise has reached a spot where you want to reset your roster and payroll. Fine. You can absolutely justify trading a rare talent who is this good to a place that values the present tense and wants to try to win a Super Bowl with him as a key piece.
But, if you do it, I just think you have to get more than you just did. I know this sounds a bit like my final views on the Doncic trade because I would never say that you never trade a player in today’s professional sports landscape. There is always a price, I suppose.
We went over this at great length on a piece actually called, “No, I'm not trading Micah Parsons.”
Inside that piece, I detailed how rarely you can trade the best player in a deal and feel like you won in the end. Everyone loves the mystery box of a 1st round pick, but unfortunately, even if you get solid NFL starters, the value lost from trading a superstar is just not worth the talent you surrender. The comp everyone uses for this Parsons deal is invariably the Khalil Mack deal of 2018. I wrote about it last December below:
In other words, the value is not close to one Micah Parsons.
In the modern era of the NFL, there are almost no genuine superstars who get dealt at this age. Jared Allen, Champ Bailey, Jalen Ramsey, Khalil Mack, Marshall Faulk, and Randy Moss are the list we are looking at. It is hard to find a single team that left those deals with great feelings about sending that player away. In a team sport, it is hard to find impact at these levels. If you have Micah Parsons wrecking games and making other guys look more effective, you can sometimes lose sight of that impact while he is still in your building. He makes everyone look better because of the attention he attracts. When he leaves, the merit of each player will determine their impact. That might be a tough reality to accept.
Micah Parsons was the best player in this trade. If you were going to trade him, you could only do it by maximizing the value. I don’t see how you gathered near enough value in return in this particular deal. In fact, we could argue that from a Green Bay perspective, this deal is an absolute no brainer that they could not agree to fast enough. They traded two picks that they expect to be poor 1st rounders and a player they were expected to release at the end of 2025 due to his guaranteed money being paid out and his odometer getting up there (essentially the Trevon Diggs decision in Dallas). Green Bay could not say yes faster. That should make Dallas quite nervous.
I don’t think you can make any deal with Green Bay without getting one of their best young players back who is both special and early in his rookie deal. Edgerrin Cooper or Matthew Golden would have probably been my demand, but as the press conference demonstrated, Dallas wanted a veteran defensive tackle as a pre-requisite for this deal. I find that incredibly curious and confusing. More on that in a bit.
But, the Cowboys could not pay three players half their cap, right?
Probably not if you insist on delaying the deals like they do. That is why this is so curious. If you always planned on trading Micah Parsons, you probably should not have kept Dak Prescott at his price. But, once you kept Dak (and botched his deal), what is the point of trading Micah? I am not saying they have to be linked together, but either you want to rebuild with picks or you don’t. How does it make much sense to use Micah to get a pick in 2027 when Dak is 34 years old? Give that kid one year to get going and Dak is now 35. These timelines don’t really agree. Unless you think these picks help you replace Dak Prescott and then I would ask why you decided to pay him $60m a year just to immediately start seeking his replacement.
I anticipate that they expected to keep all three players when they made the Dak decision. Yes, the cap decisions would begin to be problematic and difficult to navigate with the constant botching and overpaying, but this is some real throwing out the baby with the bath water to navigate a tight cap situation.
But, let’s not forget that they don’t have to wait 18 months longer than necessary on every deal. Philadelphia doesn’t. San Francisco doesn’t. Green Bay doesn’t. Dallas does. Every single time.
Still, once you get to a spot where you cannot make the contract work, I don’t understand the rush to trade him to Green Bay for this price. If you told the league he is available in March of 2025 when everyone has cash in their pocket in free agency, you can do so much better than this price. Heck, if you wait until next March in 2026, I think you also do a comparable deal because the franchise tag price is already two 1st round picks as compensation on an offer sheet. They only added Kenny Clark at 30 years old over the franchise tag rate that they would have demanded next year after seeing if he would ultimately play under his 5th year.
In other words, why did they rush this?
Let’s talk about Kenny Clark. How good is this player?
I am a huge fan of Kenny Clark’s career. He is a pro’s pro and a guy who has made a ton of plays in Green Bay. He has been there since he was a 20-year old rookie out of UCLA and there are times where he was amongst the league’s best at his position.
He is a great guy and a leader. He plays hard and you will like him. In 2023, he made a ton of plays for a Packers defense that – ironically enough – could not stop the run when it needed to. But, he was excellent at causing chaos.
I mean, look at those plays. This is the best DT Dallas has had since Jay Ratliff if he can play to those standards again.
But, man, he has some high mileage and is coming off a year where he was not close to his best version of himself with a foot situation. I am not sure if it was all health, but he did not look like the same Kenny Clark and his cap numbers were getting to a point where he was running out of time.
Further – and this is where the Cowboys press conference is hard for me to comprehend – it seems Dallas is trying to tell us that Kenny Clark is some 1-technique that will fix the run defense here with his presence. As someone who has watched his every play of his career, I will tell you that Clark is a penetrating DT who is a pretty good pass rusher and strong battler. But, he is not some run stuffer at all. He also is not some 2-gapping guy who takes on double-teams and stands his ground with huge levels of ballast. He isn’t that guy at all.
In other words, I like Kenny Clark and do think he will help quite a bit. But, will he be here in 2027? And, if you just wanted run defense, why didn’t you focus on that in the draft and keep your superstar edge rusher? Run defense is very cheap compared to a guy who gets 12 sacks a season. I honestly don’t understand this part of the deal and again, to hear them talk last night, they were identifying defensive tackles to make this deal. Why would you not identify one who is on a rookie contract at age 24 or so if you are offering Micah Parsons?
Does Kenny Clark make you better at DT? Yes. You were very bad at DT and now you have two very good starters and some decent depth. But, man, this is not enough for Micah Parsons. Not nearly.
Conclusion
I am willing to concede that Jerry was determined to get out of the Micah Parsons business and just like the Luka Doncic business, both franchises traded the star to a direct rival for an incredibly reasonable price that the rival in question could not agree to fast enough.
In my opinion, I think this is way too little to extract in the deal and therefore would not have even considered it. Further, when you see that Green Bay agreed to a 4-year deal and that all sources suggest Dallas wanted the 5-year extension, we can see how Jerry can claim he offered more in guarantees but wanted the deal to extend through 2030 to keep Micah from getting back to the market by his 30th birthday.
I don’t like this deal at all from a Dallas standpoint. The picks are nice, but unless there is a significant QB injury in Green Bay, the picks will not be terribly valuable. However, the idea of building around a different structure has some merit and therefore, the front office will be allowed to attempt to show their full vision.
The problem is what it always is – we just don’t know that they have a full vision. So much of their decision making does not stand up to the cross-examination of scrutiny when you link them together over the months. Too often, it looks like they are zig-zagging back and forth between plans with no real direction that is stable and consistent.
This move does not agree with their other moves. This one feels like a play for the future when so many have been a play for the present. They always claim to be all-in, but on what, exactly?
That is the answer that is vital. Trading Micah Parsons is the end of that era, but as usual, we wonder if they see things for what they are. Jerry says this was a move to get better now and for the playoffs. Does anyone really believe that? Does he?
There will always be a chance that there is a Herschel Walker outcome and in 10 years we laugh at how well the Micah Parsons trade worked. That is the hope that keeps people filling the stadiums of the teams that disappoint them so much. But, more than likely, Dallas got much worse yesterday. The reason is they did a deal where they did not get the best player and now try to explain it away with arguments that are not logical.
Yet, it is their path. And they will be judged on the merits of their outcome. They wanted this and now it is their job to make it work out.
We shall obviously be giving all involved a fair chance to show us those results as we now embark on the new season. Kenny Clark will be at the facility today.
And off we go into 2025!
In an unprecedented Jerry Moment, Dallas deals away their best player for flexibility.
Bob Sturm
Aug 29, 2025
They really did it. He is no longer a Dallas Cowboy.
Yes, I am pretty stunned.
A big part of this career is spending countless times admitting I got something wrong (despite being accused frequently of never admitting I ever get things wrong).
And yet again, I got this one wrong, dear readers. I clear underestimated Jerry Jones this time. Forgive me, but after covering him for 28 seasons up-close and even more from afar, I did not believe he would trade away his best player over money.
I figured, like usual, that we would see the Cowboys cave in and pay the man his money. I expected that Micah Parsons would take the field with money everywhere on September 4th in Philadelphia as the highest paid non QB in NFL history. I expected the Cowboys cap situation to be a bit of a mess for the next several years. And I expected the same basic outcomes of many Cowboys seasons to be assured to fall well short of any sort of Super Bowl scenarios, because we know how this would likely play out.
My expectations of Jerry Jones led me – and most everyone covering this story – a bit astray.
Because in the end, Jerry Jones did something that he has never done before. He made himself worse to attempt a different path forward.
=====
But, wait, that isn’t the only part of this story I got incorrect based on my priors.
I also know the Green Bay Packers intimately. I have known their organization since my birth and have tracked their movements closely and with great interest. Not 28 seasons, but roughly 50. And I know their DNA because I was raised on it. And the Green Bay Packers do not do this sort of thing. They do not leave the prudent and careful lane because they cannot afford to do so. They are never the bold and potentially reckless franchise because they can never allow emotional risks to ruin what they have carefully constructed over years. They know irrelevance in this league and realize that one false move could be all it takes.
So, I knew in my bones that the last franchise to risk everything to get someone like Micah Parsons would be the Packers. They never trade multiple draft picks of high value for a veteran player that needs more money than anyone has ever needed before.
The Packers have no “crazy owner”, so they never decide to go all-in on a hand of poker and let the draw determine whether they keep their house or not.
There is no franchise less likely to make an all-or-nothing deal like this than the Green Bay Packers. They just aren’t that kind of franchise.
=====
So, yeah. Jerry Jones acted way out of his norms and so did the other side. And for that reason, I assumed both parties were not actually going to make this deal happen.
But, yesterday, at exactly 4pm, the bomb dropped. The Cowboys really traded 26-year old Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers. And the Packers really traded two 1st round picks and Kenny Clark as well as agreed to pay Micah for his next 4-years at $188 million.
That has Parsons in Green Bay for five years at roughly $210 million, we do believe. That puts Green Bay’s AAV on this deal at $42 million per year, which makes a lot more sense than what is being reported at $47m. It is all math, but the new team coming in at roughly a million over TJ Watt’s deal to get a player 5 years younger than Watt seems a little less reckless to neutrals.
But, there is a pretty good chance you aren’t reading this today to get my feel for Green Bay’s financial situation.
So, without knowing where to begin, let’s begin.
The Cowboys traded their best player (arguably) and are worse in 2025.
This is the first and most glaring subsection. This is the one that gets today’s move linked to the trade this city made earlier this year of Luka Doncic. Those two deals are also linked because they are both once in a generation types who were born in 1999 and that Dallas citizens expected to watch their entire careers. These aren’t “face of the franchise” types only. These are potential “face of the sport” types.
Earlier this month, SturmStack’s ranking of the top 60 players in the organization had Micah Parsons in the top spot. I had him 2nd in my ballot, but I would love to share my summary of him there:
Well, I guess that last part is now off the table.
Parsons was incredible on the field. He was unstoppable. His EPA per play put the Dallas defense No. 1 when he was on the field and No. 31 when he was off of it. Think about how insane that is.
He missed a fair amount of time with a high ankle sprain in 2024 and yet he still did all of the damage on this reel below. If that was a bad year, just put him in Canton now.
He was probably annoying off the field to some. But, he was singular as a QB killer.
Micah Parsons was the biggest talent on this team and he was so young that the value of offering him to the league should have been off the charts. That is why we believe that there is merit in trading him if you think your franchise has reached a spot where you want to reset your roster and payroll. Fine. You can absolutely justify trading a rare talent who is this good to a place that values the present tense and wants to try to win a Super Bowl with him as a key piece.
But, if you do it, I just think you have to get more than you just did. I know this sounds a bit like my final views on the Doncic trade because I would never say that you never trade a player in today’s professional sports landscape. There is always a price, I suppose.
We went over this at great length on a piece actually called, “No, I'm not trading Micah Parsons.”
Inside that piece, I detailed how rarely you can trade the best player in a deal and feel like you won in the end. Everyone loves the mystery box of a 1st round pick, but unfortunately, even if you get solid NFL starters, the value lost from trading a superstar is just not worth the talent you surrender. The comp everyone uses for this Parsons deal is invariably the Khalil Mack deal of 2018. I wrote about it last December below:
In essence, if you estimate the value of the next two Green Bay picks, you probably should net out at roughly the 25th pick in each draft (that means they reach the divisional round of the playoffs by winning a wildcard game each year, but then lose). It could be much better or much worse, but let’s say it hits as the 25th pick each year. The 25th pick is worth 720 points and the No. 1 pick costs 3,000. What that means to the Arch Manning folks (you, too, Dez) is that if you added the two 1sts together that Green Bay sent, you still are only less than halfway to the top pick in either draft.
In other words, the value is not close to one Micah Parsons.
In the modern era of the NFL, there are almost no genuine superstars who get dealt at this age. Jared Allen, Champ Bailey, Jalen Ramsey, Khalil Mack, Marshall Faulk, and Randy Moss are the list we are looking at. It is hard to find a single team that left those deals with great feelings about sending that player away. In a team sport, it is hard to find impact at these levels. If you have Micah Parsons wrecking games and making other guys look more effective, you can sometimes lose sight of that impact while he is still in your building. He makes everyone look better because of the attention he attracts. When he leaves, the merit of each player will determine their impact. That might be a tough reality to accept.
Micah Parsons was the best player in this trade. If you were going to trade him, you could only do it by maximizing the value. I don’t see how you gathered near enough value in return in this particular deal. In fact, we could argue that from a Green Bay perspective, this deal is an absolute no brainer that they could not agree to fast enough. They traded two picks that they expect to be poor 1st rounders and a player they were expected to release at the end of 2025 due to his guaranteed money being paid out and his odometer getting up there (essentially the Trevon Diggs decision in Dallas). Green Bay could not say yes faster. That should make Dallas quite nervous.
I don’t think you can make any deal with Green Bay without getting one of their best young players back who is both special and early in his rookie deal. Edgerrin Cooper or Matthew Golden would have probably been my demand, but as the press conference demonstrated, Dallas wanted a veteran defensive tackle as a pre-requisite for this deal. I find that incredibly curious and confusing. More on that in a bit.
But, the Cowboys could not pay three players half their cap, right?
Probably not if you insist on delaying the deals like they do. That is why this is so curious. If you always planned on trading Micah Parsons, you probably should not have kept Dak Prescott at his price. But, once you kept Dak (and botched his deal), what is the point of trading Micah? I am not saying they have to be linked together, but either you want to rebuild with picks or you don’t. How does it make much sense to use Micah to get a pick in 2027 when Dak is 34 years old? Give that kid one year to get going and Dak is now 35. These timelines don’t really agree. Unless you think these picks help you replace Dak Prescott and then I would ask why you decided to pay him $60m a year just to immediately start seeking his replacement.
I anticipate that they expected to keep all three players when they made the Dak decision. Yes, the cap decisions would begin to be problematic and difficult to navigate with the constant botching and overpaying, but this is some real throwing out the baby with the bath water to navigate a tight cap situation.
But, let’s not forget that they don’t have to wait 18 months longer than necessary on every deal. Philadelphia doesn’t. San Francisco doesn’t. Green Bay doesn’t. Dallas does. Every single time.
Still, once you get to a spot where you cannot make the contract work, I don’t understand the rush to trade him to Green Bay for this price. If you told the league he is available in March of 2025 when everyone has cash in their pocket in free agency, you can do so much better than this price. Heck, if you wait until next March in 2026, I think you also do a comparable deal because the franchise tag price is already two 1st round picks as compensation on an offer sheet. They only added Kenny Clark at 30 years old over the franchise tag rate that they would have demanded next year after seeing if he would ultimately play under his 5th year.
In other words, why did they rush this?
Let’s talk about Kenny Clark. How good is this player?
I am a huge fan of Kenny Clark’s career. He is a pro’s pro and a guy who has made a ton of plays in Green Bay. He has been there since he was a 20-year old rookie out of UCLA and there are times where he was amongst the league’s best at his position.
He is a great guy and a leader. He plays hard and you will like him. In 2023, he made a ton of plays for a Packers defense that – ironically enough – could not stop the run when it needed to. But, he was excellent at causing chaos.
I mean, look at those plays. This is the best DT Dallas has had since Jay Ratliff if he can play to those standards again.
But, man, he has some high mileage and is coming off a year where he was not close to his best version of himself with a foot situation. I am not sure if it was all health, but he did not look like the same Kenny Clark and his cap numbers were getting to a point where he was running out of time.
Further – and this is where the Cowboys press conference is hard for me to comprehend – it seems Dallas is trying to tell us that Kenny Clark is some 1-technique that will fix the run defense here with his presence. As someone who has watched his every play of his career, I will tell you that Clark is a penetrating DT who is a pretty good pass rusher and strong battler. But, he is not some run stuffer at all. He also is not some 2-gapping guy who takes on double-teams and stands his ground with huge levels of ballast. He isn’t that guy at all.
In other words, I like Kenny Clark and do think he will help quite a bit. But, will he be here in 2027? And, if you just wanted run defense, why didn’t you focus on that in the draft and keep your superstar edge rusher? Run defense is very cheap compared to a guy who gets 12 sacks a season. I honestly don’t understand this part of the deal and again, to hear them talk last night, they were identifying defensive tackles to make this deal. Why would you not identify one who is on a rookie contract at age 24 or so if you are offering Micah Parsons?
Does Kenny Clark make you better at DT? Yes. You were very bad at DT and now you have two very good starters and some decent depth. But, man, this is not enough for Micah Parsons. Not nearly.
Conclusion
I am willing to concede that Jerry was determined to get out of the Micah Parsons business and just like the Luka Doncic business, both franchises traded the star to a direct rival for an incredibly reasonable price that the rival in question could not agree to fast enough.
In my opinion, I think this is way too little to extract in the deal and therefore would not have even considered it. Further, when you see that Green Bay agreed to a 4-year deal and that all sources suggest Dallas wanted the 5-year extension, we can see how Jerry can claim he offered more in guarantees but wanted the deal to extend through 2030 to keep Micah from getting back to the market by his 30th birthday.
I don’t like this deal at all from a Dallas standpoint. The picks are nice, but unless there is a significant QB injury in Green Bay, the picks will not be terribly valuable. However, the idea of building around a different structure has some merit and therefore, the front office will be allowed to attempt to show their full vision.
The problem is what it always is – we just don’t know that they have a full vision. So much of their decision making does not stand up to the cross-examination of scrutiny when you link them together over the months. Too often, it looks like they are zig-zagging back and forth between plans with no real direction that is stable and consistent.
This move does not agree with their other moves. This one feels like a play for the future when so many have been a play for the present. They always claim to be all-in, but on what, exactly?
That is the answer that is vital. Trading Micah Parsons is the end of that era, but as usual, we wonder if they see things for what they are. Jerry says this was a move to get better now and for the playoffs. Does anyone really believe that? Does he?
There will always be a chance that there is a Herschel Walker outcome and in 10 years we laugh at how well the Micah Parsons trade worked. That is the hope that keeps people filling the stadiums of the teams that disappoint them so much. But, more than likely, Dallas got much worse yesterday. The reason is they did a deal where they did not get the best player and now try to explain it away with arguments that are not logical.
Yet, it is their path. And they will be judged on the merits of their outcome. They wanted this and now it is their job to make it work out.
We shall obviously be giving all involved a fair chance to show us those results as we now embark on the new season. Kenny Clark will be at the facility today.
And off we go into 2025!
