After the Packers lost their final three games in 2024, they went out and traded for Micah Parsons right before the start of the 2025 season.
The Packers started last season 9-3-1 with Parsons recording 12.5 sacks.
They lost their Week 15 game to the Broncos 34-26 when Parsons tore the ACL and damaged his meniscus in his left knee. They lost their next four games of 2025, including a 31-27 meltdown loss to the Bears in the postseason.
They opened this season with a 39-22 meltdown against the Vikings.
So, the Packers have lost the past nine games the All-Pro pass rusher has not started and finished. They have been outscored 152-73 in the second half and overtime of those games.
Only once in those nine games have the Packers outscored their opponent in the fourth quarter, and that was in Week 17 of 2024 when they tried to rally against the Vikings.
The Packers will play at least three more games without Parsons, who is on reserve/physically unable to perform. He and the team are pointing to the Week 6 game against his former team, the Cowboys, but Parsons’ return can’t come soon enough.
Defensive end Micah Parsons will miss the first four games of the season because he is on the physically unable to perform list and the question of how many more he might miss was a topic at Packers General Manager Brian Gutekunst’s press conference on Tuesday.
Parsons said this summer that the team’s Week 6 game against the Cowboys the “most optimistic” date for his first game since tearing his ACL last year and Gutekunst put forth a similar timeline. Gutekunst noted that players on the PUP list can begin practicing after Week 2 and suggested that will be a possibility for Parsons.
“Once we get out of that four-week window, we’re going to be pretty close,” Gutekunst said, via Rob Demovsky of ESPN.com.
The Packers have too much invested in Parsons over the long term to push things too fast when they’re close to the end of the rehab process, but there will be plenty of interest in what happens once Week 3 rolls around in Green Bay.
To get to 53 players on the roster, the Packers continue to keep linebacker Micah Parsons off the roster. As expected, he has been moved from active/physically unable to perform to reserve/PUP.
Elsewhere, the Packers have released the following players: LS Cal Adomitis; T Brant Banks; G Dylan Barrett; CB Shemar Bartholomew; T Dalton Cooper; DT Jaden Crumedy; TE Drake Dabney; CB MJ Devonshire Jr.; G Josh Gesky; WR Chris Hilton Jr.; CB Domani Jackson; WR Kisean Johnson (KEY-shawn); EDGE Nyjalik Kelly; S Murvin Kenion III; T/G Darian Kinnard; RB Damien Martinez; EDGE Arron Mosby; WR Isaiah Neyor; RB Jaden Nixon; S Mark Perry; WR Kaden Prather; LB TJ Quinn; WR Will Sheppard; CB Jaylin Simpson; DT Nazir Stackhouse; RB Pierre Strong Jr.; TE Messiah Swinson; G Dillon Wade; EDGE Arden Walker; and LB Kristian Welch.
The Packers also waived/injured TE McCallan Castle, S Trey Dean III, and TE Thomas Yassmin, placed EDGE Collin Oliver and WR Savion Williams on injured reserve/designated for return, and placed TE Luke Musgrave, Parsons, and DT Jordon Riley on reserve/physically unable to perform.
The Packers have two quarterbacks on the roster — Jordan Love and Tyrod Taylor. Also, pending the physical that will finalize the trade with the Steelers for running back Kaleb Johnson, the Packers will have three tailbacks: Chris Brooks, MarShawn Lloyd, and Johnson.
We’ve known for some time that Packers defensive end Micah Parsons would not be ready to play at the start of the regular season and the team made it official on Sunday.
Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that they have moved Parsons to the regular season version of the physically unable to perform list. The move means Parsons will not be eligible to play until the team’s fifth game of the season.
Parsons’s return could take even longer than that, however. He said earlier this month that the team’s Week 6 game against the Cowboys would be the “most optimistic” date for him to return from last season’s torn ACL.
Whether that’s a realistic return date for Parsons or not will become clearer over the coming weeks and the Packers will have to count on others to pick up the defensive slack until he’s back in the lineup.
After the Cowboys traded Micah Parsons to the Packers last year, Dallas owner and G.M. Jerry Jones compared the move to the Herschel Walker trade from 1989.
On Thursday, Jerry did it again.
“You could say those picks got us key players, but the main thing that the Herschel Walker trade did, it caused me to be more aggressive and caused us to, if you will, take more risk because we had more picks,” Jones said, via Todd Archer of ESPN.
But the Parsons deal sacrificed one of the best defensive players in the NFL for a 2026 first-round pick, a 2027 first-round pick, and defensive tackle Kenny Clark. For Walker, who had one 1,000-yard performance in three NFL seasons, the Cowboys emerged with three first-round picks, three second-round picks, a third-round pick, and a sixth-round pick.
Still, Jerry views the two extra first-round picks as the spark needed to turn him into a gambler.
“It’s like going to Las Vegas with some extra money in your pocket or going out there with the baby’s new pair of shoes and formula money in your pocket,” Jones said. “You can’t be as good a crapshooter as you are when you’ve got the baby’s new pair of shoes throwing out there with it.
“So, in a way, this actually created a mental part to us and to my role in it with me, to step out and make the moves and take, if you will, risks that are involved to be where we are today with a complete makeover of the defense.”
Jones nevertheless acknowledges that Parsons is a special talent.
“Even though Micah’s an outstanding talent [that] anybody would like to have, the bottom line is that I like what the result of the trade has ended up as I stand here today,” Jones said.
Frankly, it’s no surprise. That’s Jerry’s way. The glass is always half-full, even when it’s not. He craves interest in his team, and he knows how to generate it.
But if he’s truly serious about the Parsons trade causing future picks to burn a hole in his pocket, he should be looking to make more deals. Especially if the Raiders struggle to start the season and defensive end Maxx Crosby once again becomes available.
We’ve known for some time that Packers defensive end Micah Parsons won’t return to action for the first four games of Green Bay’s season, but just how long he’ll be out remains up in the air.
Parsons recently said that it was less important when he’s back than what kind of player he is when he’s back on the field, but it remains a popular topic of conversation around the star pass rusher. During an appearance on NFL Network Monday, Parsons was asked if he thinks he can make it back for a Week 6 home game against the Cowboys.
“That’s the most optimistic that I could be back,” Parsons said. “I could be later, there could be setbacks. Trying to integrate back into football is completely different than running on cones and ladders.”
The prospect of playing the team that dealt him to the Packers is surely an appealing one for Parsons, but the bigger picture will take precedence for the key member of the Packers defense. More clarity on the chance of Parsons, who said he’s “pretty happy” with where he is in the rehab process, returning for that game will come in the next few weeks.
Old-school coaches will often attribute missed practice time in training camp to serious in-season injuries, like torn ACLs.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Packers linebacker Micah Parsons gave some credence to that notion.
Asked why he thinks his ACL injury happened on what seemed to be a fairly routine play in Week 15 against the Broncos, Parsons said this: “You know, it’s hard to really think — I could just think of it was just accumulative things within my body, pushing through, the no camp, dealing with injuries throughout the season, and I just think my body just was overloaded and — which caused my knee to give out. But, you know, I don’t really think why the situation happened. I think, based off of, you know, how I feel at this point, I feel like a much better player in the sense of how I feel. I feel more stable. I feel stronger.”
Parsons skipped all of training camp last year while waiting for a contract from the Cowboys that never came. Eventually, he was traded to the Packers less than two weeks before the start of the regular season.
While the pro-laundry crowd will point to Parsons’s explanation as a reason for players to not hold in while negotiating a new deal, the better view is that both sides should treat the start of training camp as a firm deadline for getting something done, negotiating in good faith toward the agreed-to stroke of midnight, and get the deal done before camp opens.
Most of these deals are going to get done anyway. Why not get them done in a way that ensures the player will be available to properly prepare himself for the season?
The entire goal for the player is to obtain the security that comes from shifting the injury risk to the team. The player holds in to avoid that risk. If the team is inevitably going to be assuming the risk, why not do it at a time that allows the player to best prepare himself for an injury-free season?
It remains unclear when Packers defensive end Micah Parsons will be back on the field, but he doesn’t think anyone should be focused on the calendar when thinking about his return from last year’s torn ACL.
Parsons is not expected to be ready to go at the start of the regular season and he called it “very realistic” that he’ll be back for a Week 6 home game against the Cowboys while speaking to reporters on Tuesday. He also said that the actual date of his return is of less importance than the player he is when he does make his next appearance in the Green Bay lineup.
Parsons made it clear that he’s expecting to be just as disruptive to offenses as he was before the injury.
“When you come out of these situations, you’re either going to be better or worse,” Parsons said, via Matt Schneidman of TheAthletic.com. “For me, I’ve done everything I possibly can to be better. People are worried about if I come back. People should worry about how I’m gonna be when I come back. That’s my mentality and how I feel, how I’m gonna approach when I’m back. People worried about the knee, they should be worried about how I’m gonna play when I get back. The anger, the frustration, the things that I’m about to let out because of how long it’s been since I’ve played. So I think that’s what people should really worry about. How great is Micah gonna be when he gets back? Not about when I get back because that’s the short term.”
The Packers know Parsons’s long-term value to the team is greater than what a few early season games are worth, so everyone should be on board with Parsons getting as much time as needed to feel like he can be the defensive force that the Packers need him to be this season.
Packers edge rusher Micah Parsons is making good progress in his rehab from a torn ACL, but it continues to sound like he will not be ready to play at the start of the season.
While General Manager Brian Gutekunst told reporters that he’s open to the possibility of Parsons coming off the active/physically unable to perform list before the end of training camp, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.
“Yeah, I’d like to have enough flexibility to leave the door open. But that would be unlikely, just from a timing perspective,” Gutekunst said in his Wednesday press conference. “We’ve invested a lot in him, so we want to make sure he’s ready to go before we even think about putting him out there.”
That being said, Parsons has made plenty of progress since suffering the injury in December.
“I may have mentioned it before, but he’s a little bit of a genetic freak, so things come pretty easy to him,” Gutekunst said. “Again, he’s still, obviously, got a long ways to go. These are major injuries, so as you go through these things and how hard they have to work to get back, there’s always going to be little setbacks here and there. But he’s doing great right now.”
Parsons registered 12.5 sacks with 12 tackles for loss and 27 quarterback hits in 14 games last season, his first with the Packers.
Micah Parsons was not part of the initial batch of Packers players to land on the teams physically unable to perform list, but word was that the move was coming on Tuesday and it is now official.
The NFL’s daily transaction report shows that the defensive end has been moved to the list along with offensive tackle Brant Banks, long snapper Matt Orzech, defensive end Jordon Riley, and defensive tackle Nazir Stackhouse. The Packers also signed kicker Lenny Krieg and tight end Thomas Yassmin. Defensive tackle Dante Barnett and kicker Lucas Havrisik were waived to round out the day’s moves.
Parsons is not expected to be ready to return from his torn ACL until October at the earliest. He can move to the reserve version of the PUP list at the cut to 53 players, which would keep him out at least four games.
The Packers placed six other players on injury lists Monday and all of the players can be activated at any point during training camp.
