We’re only just beginning Week 2 of the 2025 NFL season, yet the Cowboys continue to field scores of questions regarding their decision to trade Micah Parsons.
It doesn’t help that Parsons’ new team, the Green Bay Packers, are driving day-after discussion with their dominant defensive performances through two weeks. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones remains steadfast, however, that he made the right decision in sending Parsons to Wisconsin.
“There are 30 other teams, other than the Cowboys, playing without Micah,” Jones said Friday on 105.3 The Fan. “There’s ways to play defense and scheme that don’t necessarily involve, on any player, whether it be Deion Sanders, looking way back or who it is… A lot of people won a lot of games and didn’t have Deion Sanders on the field for them. How’d that happen? That’s called you’ve got to have about minimum 40-something players to play this game.”
Jones has experience with moving one player for a collection of fresh faces. He famously traded running back Herschel Walker to Minnesota in a deal that awarded Dallas an assortment of draft picks the Cowboys eventually used to rebuild their roster into the dynastic club that won three Super Bowls in the 1990s.
Thirty years later, Dallas is still coasting on the energy produced by those triumphs. The Parsons deal was different, though, because Jones willingly moved an elite defender instead of paying him at market rate and has since claimed it was a deal done with the belief it improved their chances of winning now.
“I see an allocation. I see more of an allocation here,” Jones explained. “As opposed to Herschel Walker, which was to basically get draft picks and was basically a recognition that we would compete on another day, this was not that. This was a very conscious trade to get three, four, five, six players for one.
“Which will be better off? The one player? Outstanding. He’s an outstanding player. But we should be able to get, as a matter of fact, we’ve got one on the field [Kenny Clark]. And of course, people say, ‘But he’s no Micah.’ Well, I’m not going to debate that at all because Micah is very, very special. But I’ll tell you this right now, by the time this happens, and as we look forward to Dak’s time, when we made his contract and we look forward, this was the best way to maximize our chance to get a Super Bowl for Dak (Prescott).”