There comes a time in the life of every senior citizen when large responsibilities, such as the operation of a motor vehicle, heavy machinery or even the lawnmower must be reevaluated with sobriety. It’s only natural that certain aspects of daily life be delegated to those who maintain the sharpness and reaction time of their youth. The problem comes when those entering their golden years don’t want to give up the often underappreciated thrill of taking a spin in the Cadillac to Dairy Queen for ice cream, or, in a case that was brought to our attention Thursday, maintaining a very serious role in running the Dallas Cowboys.

The Micah Parsons trade, which one league source wisely described as an “NBA-style salary dump” is like the Khalil Mack trade on steroids (in terms of stupidity—the Cowboys didn’t even get as much for Parsons as the Raiders did in return for Mack, despite the fact that Mack was older at the time of the trade). I thought it impossible to possess more hubris than an unchecked, all-powerful Jon Gruden and yet here we are dissecting a deal that sent arguably the pass rusher with the highest ceiling in the NFL to a conference rival for two first-round picks and a defensive tackle who will turn 30 before Halloween this year.

Jerry Jones seems to be taking online classes from the Nico Harrison school of management, which requires students to dangle a generational talent and, after a phone call or two, throw up your hands and take literally whatever the person on the other line offers you. I can’t imagine what it was like to embody Packers GM Brian Gutekunst on the other line. In some way, he had to feel a bit guilty, like Alex Trebek selling reverse mortgages to people who quit reading the fine print a long time ago.

Why wasn’t this trade done before the NFL draft when Jones could have maximized his leverage and Parsons’s value, especially with a weak pass-rushing class that fell off a cliff after the selection of Abdul Carter at No. 3? Why did he absolutely gut the willingness to compete out of his roster a week before the team plays the Eagles in the NFL Kickoff Game? If Jones was always going to trade Parsons, couldn’t he have come to that conclusion sooner and used some of that bankroll to sign players like Derek Henry a season ago, who actually wanted to be in Dallas in the first place? How on Earth did the Seahawks have to give up more for Jamal Adams than the Packers did for Micah Freaking Parsons? Is Jones aware that these first-round picks he’s getting will likely be later in the first round, now that he gave an 11-win team from a year ago Micah Freaking Parsons? 

The Jones family has made a mockery of the franchise they brought to relevance 30 years ago and has coasted like a gasless convertible for the last two decades. What’s truly sad is that all of this cheapness, all of this incredible lack of giving a s--t from ownership, has overshadowed one of the league’s best personnel departments, which unearthed Tony Romo in undrafted free agency. It also selected Dak Prescott in the fourth round after the owner professed his love for *checks notes* former Houston Roughnecks quarterback Connor Cook. This is a group of people who built the best offensive line in the NFL—a unit which remained that way for half a decade—but withered under a predictable offense piloted by a head coach the owner couldn’t be bothered to part ways with.  

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones meets with outside linebacker Micah Parsons prior to a playoff game.
With Parsons gone, the Jones family is poised to waste the primes of Dak Prescott and Ceedee Lamb. | Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images

Now that Parsons is gone, the Jones’s are gleefully wasting the remaining years of Prescott’s prime and that of CeeDee Lamb, a receiver, who, one has to imagine, is just as eager to depart the padded, sterile walls of Frisco, Texas, for a place interested in hunting for a championship.

Seriously, how dumb does Jones think we all are, trotting out a Netflix documentary about the glory days and his gambler persona while he runs one of the richest sports properties like a black-hearted private equity firm helmed by a few spaced-out failsons? The Cowboys are less a cogent franchise than a series of laughable gaffes layered atop one another like rickety sheets of plywood.  

Please, please don’t attempt to intellectualize this as the Herschel Walker trade 2.0. Walker was a 27-year-old running back with a heavier workload in his past than a Depression-era coal miner. This is more akin to the Packers bringing in Reggie White for six consecutive Pro Bowl seasons, proving that they understand how to properly evaluate generational talent.

Seriously, it took one of the most free-agent averse franchises in the NFL all of 30 seconds to come up with a generational financial package for Parsons that comfortably made him the highest-paid nonquarterback in NFL history. Amazing how easy it was to find—and correctly pronounce—the name of Parsons’s agent, which Jones was so publicly struggling to do.

More than anything, we should be happy for Parsons, who fought his way out of this fake-ass QVC broadcast masquerading as a professional football team. So long as this owner remains, the Cowboys will be a handful of nice-looking fish roaming around in a cloudy tank, with no real direction, just an avenue to catch people’s attention as they walk on by. Fans who stick around, fans who believe they are in on the three-dimensional chess, fans who think that this decade is going to be the one in which the old gambler rewards their blood, sweat and hard-earned money with anything but the bare minimum effort, are disappointingly simple-minded. You are under the spell of a grifter, my friends, one who should have had the keys taken away a long, long time ago.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Micah Parsons Trade Is Proof Jerry Jones Should No Longer Lead Cowboys.