Micah Parsons is going to get paid a lot of money by the Dallas Cowboys, probably sooner rather than later. Jerry Jones will open his enormous vault and make the linebacker one of the highest-paid defensive players in the game.
It is inevitable. It will happen, as long as Parsons doesn’t get hurt this summer. The two men even apparently agreed to the parameters of a deal back in March.
Yet, for some reason, here we are again, in the same spot as always with the Cowboys, where Jones just can’t help but make things more difficult than they should be. Parsons is yet another star player they intend to keep and have promised to pay, waiting in limbo for a deal everyone knows he will get. Meanwhile, Jones is once again insisting there’s no “angst,” no reason to panic.
Jerry Jones and Micah Parsons don’t seem to be on the same page as Cowboys camp opens and the All-Pro linebacker has yet to sign an extension. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
So why, every year, does he keep welcoming that panic in?
“We’re just working with what it is,” Jones told reporters as his players reported to camp in Oxnard, Calif., on Monday. “It’s not uncommon for me and not anything there’s a lot of angst over. … We are where we are. And I sign the check. Period.”
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Translation: Jones is the boss. The deal will be done when he says it’s done. And if the waiting doesn’t make sense to anyone else … well, that’s just too bad.
It probably makes the least sense to the 26-year-old Parsons, easily one of the five best defensive players in the NFL. The Cowboys have made it clear they plan to give him a lucrative, long-term extension. And they obviously know he’ll end up being one of the NFL’s highest-paid defensive players, which means a deal worth more than $40 million per year.
In fact, back in March, Jones and Parsons had a one-on-one meeting in the owner’s office and hammered out a deal — or so it seemed. “Let’s put it like this,” Jones said on Monday. “We went over every possible detail that you can go over and had agreement.”
And yet, there is no deal. It’s no different than it was last summer when receiver CeeDee Lamb sat out waiting for his inevitable contract, or in 2023 when guard Zack Martin skipped the start of camp waiting for the deal he knew he was going to get. Parsons, for the moment, at least has arrived at camp and has promised to be a limited participant. That makes him more like quarterback Dak Prescott, who practiced all last summer waiting for his predictable contract extension.
It’s become a weird, annual, and totally pointless tradition. Every one of those players, by the way, got exactly the mega-deal that everyone expected them to get, almost to the penny. And as Jones waited, their prices went up, not down. Prescott eventually signed a four-year, $240 million extension that made him the highest-paid player in the NFL at the time.
This isn’t some version of 3-D chess by a genius businessman. The same thing will happen with Parsons, too. So why not just get this over with and pay him now?
“There’s nothing new about what we’re talking about relative to contracts,” Jones said. “That’s been going on a long time. If you say, ‘Well, if you don’t get him in, are you going to lose the first two games and go on and win the Super Bowl?’ Well, I’ll take that.”
Sure. Who wouldn’t? But Jones was talking about running back Emmitt Smith with the 1993 Cowboys, who entered camp as the defending champs. These Cowboys are coming off a 7-10 season, bad enough for Jones to fire coach Mike McCarthy, who had been left dangling all year without a new contract.
This is a flawed team with a new coach, Brian Schottenheimer, who was plucked from obscurity and handed an enormous task. Forget the Super Bowl, it’ll be a heavy lift just to get the Cowboys back to the playoffs. Having all his pieces in place with minimal distractions would surely help.
Instead, Jones created an unnecessary, but surely constant source of distraction. That was clear on Monday when, during his camp-opening press conference, Jones seemingly took a small shot at Parsons, who missed four games with an ankle sprain last season. He said, “Just because we sign him doesn’t mean we’re going to have him. He was hurt six games last year.”
Yeah, it was a mild shot. But maybe not to Parsons. Because everyone sure did notice that when former NFL star J.J. Watt criticized it on social media — posting “Nothing makes guys want to fight for you more than hearing how upset you are that they got hurt while fighting for you.” — Parsons quickly re-posted it from his account.
The longer this lingers, there will be more of that silliness. Yet it could all be stopped immediately if Jones would just sign the check he knows he’s eventually going to sign.
So again, why not?
“Contracts are four, five years, OK?” Jerry Jones said. “There’s a lot of water under the bridge if you step out there and do something in the first two or three. You can get hit by a car. Seriously. And so there’s a lot to look at over a lot of years that could make a big difference.
“Have you ever heard of any clubs committing to players, and they didn’t pan out after they committed to them? We have.”
OK, sure, there’s always the risk of a car accident or some kind of injury. But that risk — much like Parsons’ price — isn’t going to diminish by making Parsons wait longer.
“It’s not uncommon for me,” Jones said, “and not anything there’s a lot of angst over.”
Again, he’s not wrong. Parsons is locked in for this season and will be paid a hefty $24 million — enough to make it a near-zero chance that he’d hold out into the season. And the franchise tag, while expensive, gives the Cowboys some control over him through 2026 and maybe even 2027, too.
But it won’t go on that long. Even Jones knows that the end game is giving Parsons his money long before that. He probably should know that it would be helpful to get it done soon, so everyone can be happy and the Cowboys can just focus on football for a change, though it’s not clear that he does.
“I’m not concerned at all about what our team can be this year and develop into and what we make of our training camp,” Jones said. “I’m not at all concerned about a contract that involves or affects that in any way. I can’t emphasize that enough.”
He never is, which is why the Cowboys are here again, under another dark cloud, with another unhappy star waiting for a pay day that’s inevitable. For Jones, the waiting isn’t the hardest part.
It’s just an unnecessary game that he loves to play.
Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.
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