Micah Parsons is a lot of things. But he’s no one’s fool.
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.
The Cowboys didn’t come to a flashpoint where they pivoted, but they did start to wrap their heads around the idea of letting Parsons go, getting more affordable talent on the roster through a raft of high draft picks, and being able to re-sign young players such as Tyler Smith, Daron Bland and Sam Williams (and maybe even George Pickens). Also, in looking back at recent Super Bowl champions, only one was built around a great edge rusher—and the 2015 Broncos won it all while Von Miller was still on his rookie contract.
• Dallas still wanted to keep Parsons, but when the trade request came in, teams reached out to express interest and Green Bay was among them. The Cowboys rebuffed overtures, wanting to see how the summer played out first.
During camp in California, Parsons was very attentive with and receptive to his new defensive coaches—good in walkthroughs, good in the meeting room and staying up on his workout regimen. There was then a marked difference in how he carried himself at practice, when cameras were on, and when ownership was around, which gave everyone the feeling that he was very much trying to send a message to the bosses.
Only he knows his intent. However, it seemed clear to others that he was trying to irk management in a way that they couldn’t quite point the finger at him.
• Trust was another factor. Jerry Jones has proved over the years to be willing to reward his best players at the highest level, and has built life-long relationships with scores of the stars who’ve made their way through North Texas over his 36 seasons leading the franchise.
But one thing that was brought up to me over the past few days is that Jones needs to trust a player to pay him like that. And somewhere along the line, Parsons lost Jones’s trust.
Last night, Parsons told NFL Network’s Jane Slater that he and agent David Mulugheta went back to Jones, as trade interest ramped up again, to try to restart talks on a long-term extension. The Cowboys’ response, per Parsons, was to “play on the fifth-year option or leave.” Jones himself confirmed Parsons’s claim at his presser—“That is correct,” he said emphatically—which shows to which point the relationship, and trust, had frayed.
• The Packers, meanwhile, monitored the situation through the summer. Last week, the discussion picked up some steam internally, and a vision for what Parsons could do for the defense was solidified. Green Bay has drafted and developed a balanced roster full of very good players, with the big question this summer being how many of their young receivers, offensive or defensive linemen, or linebackers could become true difference-makers.
In Parsons, they get one. The Packers wanted more speed on the edge to combat the mobile quarterbacks they’ll face this year, and going forward, and could envision a good rotation with Parsons, Rashan Gary and Lukas Van Ness, with the ability to play all three together on passing downs. In Parsons himself, they saw a violent player and a fierce competitor who can play fast and one you can line up all over the line of scrimmage.
Now, the idea of letting Clark go was less than ideal—he is beloved by everyone in the Packers’ organization. But they had depth on the interior of the defensive line, reflected in how they kept six tackles at the cutdown, with Colby Wooden emerging last year, and following that up with a strong summer, Karl Brooks bringing a steady presence, and Nazir Stackhouse and Warren Brinson having promise as run stoppers.
That gave them flexibility to be receptive to Dallas’s ask for Clark.
• Earlier in the week, talks got more serious. The Packers were one of six teams that had their hats in the ring. The Cowboys, as part of the big-picture reimagination of the team behind new coach Brian Schottenheimer, were looking to add help for now and later.
So the ask of two first-rounders and a player was logical. Not every team involved got there.
In the player coming aboard, the Cowboys were looking for a couple of things.
One was the aforementioned run-defense help—and Clark brings that with versatility to line up as a 3-technique, a 2-technique or a nose, complementing what Osa Odighizuwa brings to the table as an attacking, up-field interior lineman (and the Cowboys believe Clark, after a down pass-rush year, still has some pass-rush juice). The other was a leadership component Dallas was looking for as part of that larger reimagination of the team under Schottenheimer. Clark has very much always been the adult in the room.
They also preferred an interior lineman to an edge such as Gary or Van Ness, even after losing DeMarcus Lawrence earlier this offseason. The reason? Dallas felt good about its depth there, with Williams growing, Dante Fowler Jr. back from Washington, and second-rounder Donovan Ezeiruaku exceeding expectations. The team felt a little shakier on what it had inside beyond just Odighizuwa.
• Conversely, the Packers felt like their locker room, and defense specifically, could absorb a guy with Parsons’s personality. As an example, last year, there were questions about Xavier McKinney, who’d had an up-and-down few years fitting into the Giants’ culture after leaving Alabama with a pristine reputation. Carrying that reputation, McKinney was quickly integrated by DC Jeff Hafley and the team’s young leaders, and he wound up with eight interceptions and was voted first-team All-Pro.
Trust will be the key to this move. The one coach who really reached Parsons in Dallas was Dan Quinn, who had the advantage of getting him on the ground floor of his NFL career. Quinn also, to a degree, limited the freelancing Parsons could do by playing him at linebacker early on and giving him more responsibility—Parsons started to drift more in that regard when he became more exclusively a pass rusher.
The Packers, for their part, have a good group of people on that side of the ball that play disciplined and within the framework of the scheme, and believe those guys will bring Parsons, now financially secure, with them.
• The deal really started to crystallize Wednesday, with the Packers then working feverishly to get Parsons signed long-term—the four-year, $188 million deal was groundbreaking for a nonquarterback in a lot of different ways.
And that means Parsons is headed to a very different place, going from having the NFL’s most prominent owner as his boss to a team with no owner, from a massive market to a small town, and from glitzy Jerry World to historic Lambeau Field. It probably will, in a way, harken back to Parsons’s college days, as a star in State College, a pinprick of a speck on the map in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
The judgment for the trade will come at different paces.
The Packers will be judged in the moment. This is a for-now move by a team that feels like, after making the playoffs in its first two years with Jordan Love as starting quarterback, it’s been on the doorstep of making it out of the NFC and to the Super Bowl. So a simple playoff appearance this year will be assessed much differently than the past two.
As for Dallas, again, this is a big-picture move for a team that, over the years, hasn’t made many like it. The Netflix series that released last week dubs Jones “The Gambler,” but in this case, that moniker should be reserved for the guys on the other side of the table.
And then, there’s Parsons himself. There were some questions with Cowboys folks who’d been around him about how much he truly loved football versus what football has done for him off the field. Conversely, he’s always talked openly about wanting to be one of the game’s all-time greats, and the motor and violence he plays with do exude a passion for the game.
So how will this be judged, in the end?
Ultimately, and finally, that’s something Parsons will be able to control.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside Look at How Micah Parsons Trade to Packers Came Together.