Acme Packing Company
Management has plenty of options when it comes to keeping labor in line. If you’re reading this and have ever had a job, I’m sure you’ve seen this power exercised in at least one form of fashion at least once in your life. In the NFL, though, front offices have one lever they can pull that isn’t common in most industries: sending your ass to some place you don’t prefer to be.
Post-Brett Favre, because of the winning the franchise has done, the Green Bay Packers haven’t had much of an issue collecting talent. Before Favre, though, Green Bay was known as Siberia, a less-than-cute way to describe our beloved Frozen Tundra.
Don’t believe me? Gil Brandt (RIP), who was the architect for two Super Bowl teams with the Dallas Cowboys, once tweeted: “Back in the day we used to tell players we’d send them to Siberia, aka Green Bay, when they’d ask for a trade.” Even former Packers President/CEO Mark Murphy, who played with Washington from 1977 to 1984, admitted, “When I played…Green Bay was the Siberia of the NFL,” while holding the title as the Packers’ pseudo-owner.
While QB1, Aaron Rodgers famously stated, “I think we can all understand Green Bay isn’t a huge vacation destination. People come here to play with me.” A few years later, he gushed nonstop about all of the activities that there were to do in New York City as a member of the Jets.
Please spare me the comments telling me the benefits of living in Green Bay. I understand what living outside of major metros in the United States is like. For most of the first 26 years of my life, I lived in a county of about 20,000 people in an unincorporated community on a mountain. You’d be preaching to the choir.
The fact of the matter, though, is that the US has about 340 million people, and about half of them live in 15 combined statistical areas, essentially metro areas. According to census data, a little over 75 percent of Americans live in metros larger than Green Bay. So while Brown County may seem plenty populated to someone who grew up in small-town America, like me, others do have differing opinions.
So why bring this up? Because I believe it’s critical in understanding what’s going on with the Micah Parsons rumors.
Based on multiple conversations that I’ve had over the past couple of days, here’s my belief of what is happening and why we’re getting all this Parsons trade buzz — beyond it just being a juicy trade hypothetical involving two popular franchises and a disgruntled All-Pro defender near the start of the regular season.
First of all, Parsons and the Cowboys clearly don’t see eye-to-eye on contract compensation after owner Jerry Jones’ direct-to-player conversations that excluded Parsons’ agent, David Mulugheta, failed to produce a deal. Jones, a multi-billionaire who was humble enough to center himself in a recent Netflix series about the Dallas Cowboys’ Super Bowl runs in...
