Blogging The Boys
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...
