The Dallas Cowboys are no longer America’s Team. There’s a chance they aren’t even Texas’s team.
Three years ago, the Houston Texans had a very similar situation to the one the Cowboys just resolved. Quarterback Deshaun Watson had requested a trade. He had sat out an entire season, with pay. He had more than 20 civil lawsuits pending.
Texans G.M. Nick Caserio worked the situation masterfully, creating a four-team competition between the Saints, Panthers, Falcons, and Browns that allowed Caserio to name his price to each of them before they were allowed to even talk to Watson.
The Cowboys could have done the same thing with linebacker Micah Parsons. But, as they often do, they waited too long to make a decision.
More broadly, the Cowboys all too often seem to lack clear strategic vision. But, hey, that’s what happens when the General Manager never should have been the General Manager in the first place.
Yes, the owner has the ability to give himself any job he wants. And, when Jerry Jones bought the team in 1989, he gave himself Tex Schramm’s job.
Jones had no objective qualifications for Tex Schramm’s job. And here’s the biggest irony about the state of the team, nearly four full decades into Jerry’s run as G.M. While the front office under Jones has done a very good job of drafting and developing talent, they’ve mismanaged the one thing Jerry brought to the table when he bought the team — knowing when and how to do good deals.
They built their team that won three Super Bowls in four years before the salary cap era began. Even since the spending limit was put in place, they’ve bungled big deals. They’ve waited too long to get guys extended. They’ve extended some of the wrong guys.
Most recently, they blew the ideal window to get the most for Parsons.
It’s a simple proposition. If they were going to trade Parsons, they should have made it known in early March that he would be available. Before teams spent their cash and cap allocations for 2025. Before they signed, or re-signed, pass rushers in free agency. Before they drafted young pass rushers.
On Thursday night, Jones admitted that he was thinking about trading Parsons months ago.
“This trade was not just thought about today,” Jones told reporters. “This trade has been going on in our minds and our strategies and being talked about — it’s been going on all spring. It culminated today and it came quick, but that’s the way things go.”
Did they have trade talks before the draft?
“We had them,” Jones said. “But we didn’t have them with anybody else.”
They should have. If they had, they would have gotten more.
Jones could brush that off as pure speculation. It’s more accurate to call it fact. More teams would have had the cap space in March. More teams would have had interest in March. More teams would have come to the table in March.
If Jones had handled it the right way, it would have unfolded as another Deshaun Watson-style competition. While it’s hard to imagine Parsons getting more than the compensation package he received from the Packers, the Cowboys would have gotten more than a 2026 and 2027 first-round pick and a soon-to-be 30-year-old defensive tackle who has made the Pro Bowl three times in nine seasons.
Beyond the volume of picks, the Cowboys would have acquired selections that could have been used in 2025. As explained last week, they could have emerged with someone like Travis Hunter or Abdul Carter. And they could have gotten more than that.
As it stands, they got a player whose prime will soon be ending (if it hasn’t already), a pair of future first-round picks that likely will land late in the round, and the cash and cap space saved by not paying a player who deserved a giant pile of both.
No, the Cowboys will never admit that they made a mistake. At some level, they know. They screwed this one up, in multiple ways. Above all else, they waited too long to make Micah available.
If they’d done it in March, they would have gotten more.
Maybe, in hindsight, they should have hired Nick Caserio to be the G.M. before the Texans did.
Cowboys cornerback Trevon Diggs had another full practice session on Sunday, but it looks like a call on his status for Thursday’s game against the Eagles will have to wait a little longer.
Diggs returned to full practice participation last week and he told reporters on Sunday that he continues to work without any limitations as he makes his way back from last year’s knee surgery. He said he remains unsure about whether he will be on the field against the Eagles, so the next few days of practice will be telling.
The Cowboys release their first injury report of the season on Monday.
Left tackle Tyler Guyton is also going to be on that report, but he’s feeling more bullish about his status for Thursday night. Guyton said, via Clarence Hill of ALLDLLS.com, that he expects to be in the lineup for Week 1.
The Eagles will be opening the season against the Cowboys at home on Thursday night and their preparation for the game took a turn late last week.
Dallas traded defensive end Micah Parsons to the Packers for two first-round picks and defensive tackle Kenny Clark, which brought an end to a protracted contract impasse and left a very different looking Cowboys defense for the Eagles to face in their opener. On Sunday, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni said the team isn’t spending as much time thinking about players who won’t be on the field as they are on Clark and others who will be trying to stop their defense.
“We have so much going on here,” Sirianni said, via a transcript from the team. “We’re getting ready to play the Cowboys, so he’s in your thoughts for game planning, but they still have guys that we have to prepare for. They have Kenny Clark, who’s a really good player, and they have good depth at that defensive end group. You don’t get too wrapped up in that except for some of the things you’re doing with the game plan. But, also understanding that they have a lot of good players over there and getting ready for those guys and shifting your attention to that.”
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said last week that a desire to upgrade the team’s run defense was a factor in the Parsons trade. With Saquon Barkley and Jalen Hurts still around for the Eagles, Thursday will provide an early chance for the Cowboys to show they’ve improved in that area.
The short-term third-party beneficiaries of the Micah Parsons trade were the Eagles. They’ll no longer have to face him, twice per year. More immediately, they’ll avoid him in the Week 1 opener.
Via Todd Archer of ESPN.com, Philly tackle Jordan Mailata called the news a “sigh of relief.”
“It’s just kind of crazy,” Mailata said. “The last four or five years we’ve played the Dallas Cowboys, we’ve come up with a game plan [for him] because Micah’s a game wrecker. . . . However, that is a talented D-line and a talented defense, so you have to treat them with the same respect with or without Micah Parsons.”
It meshes with key insights from former Cowboys coach Jason Garrett on Friday’s PFT Live. Teams need to have a plan for Parsons. They need to know where he is on every play, and they need to know how they’re going to stop him. Or at least how they’ll try.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni kept his cards a little closer to the vest when asked right out of the gates about the Parsons trade
“We have so much going on here,” Sirianni said, via quotes distributed by the team. “We’re getting ready to play the Cowboys, so he’s in your thoughts for game planning, but they still have guys that we have to prepare for. They have Kenny Clark, who’s a really good player, and they have good depth at that defensive end group. You don’t get too wrapped up in that except for some of the things you’re doing with the game plan. But, also understanding that they have a lot of good players over there and getting ready for those guys and shifting your attention to that.”
While the Eagles have avoided Parsons for now, they’ll see him in Week 10, on Monday Night Football from Lambeau Field. And, frankly, his presence on the Packers could be more detrimental to the Eagles getting back to the Super Bowl.
The Eagles were already objectively better than the Cowboys. The Packers gave the Eagles a pretty tough contest in the 2024 wild-card round. If they meet in the postseason again, Micah could end up being the difference-maker.
A.J. Brown missed significant practice time in training camp with a hamstring injury, but the Eagles receiver insists he’ll be in the lineup come Thursday in the season opener against the Cowboys.
“Hell, yeah,” Brown said emphatically, via Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Brown, who previously has had soft-tissue injuries, left practice early with an injury Aug. 1. The Eagles never indicated his absence from practice was anything other than precautionary.
He apparently returned to practice Sunday, though it is unknown how much he did since a practice report was not required.
Brown missed three games last season with a hamstring injury, and the Eagles went 1-2 in those games.
He has 261 catches for 4,031 yards and 25 touchdowns in three seasons in Philadelphia, while adding 25 receptions for 309 yards and three touchdowns in seven postseason games with the Eagles.
