Trading away your best player doesn’t get you what it used to. Back in 1989, the Dallas Cowboys’ brand-new owner, Jerry Jones, traded Herschel Walker for a package that included four players, three first-round picks, and three second-round picks. It’s the trade that brought Emmitt Smith, among others, to Dallas and was seen as the spark for the team’s dynastic run through the mid-’90s. In 2025, all Jerry managed to get in trading away all-world pass rusher Micah Parsons was a couple of first-round picks and a 29-year-old defensive tackle, Kenny Clark, who hasn’t been good in a few years. That was all it cost, along with a four-year, $188 million contract, for the Packers to pry Parsons from the Cowboys.
As I’m writing this, “FLEECED” is trending on X, which is about all the analysis you need to determine who won this trade. Maybe it’s simply that Jerry didn’t want to get shown up in his own town. Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison looked to be running away with the Worst Trade by a Dallas Sports Team Award after sending Luka Doncic to the Lakers in early February. Now, we have ourselves a race.
There’s really no explanation for why the Cowboys made this stunning move other than the obvious: In refusing to negotiate with Parsons’s agent, David Mulugheta, Jones burned a bridge with Parsons beyond repair, so the Cowboys got what they could in return. In Jones’s first post-trade press conference, which included an 11-minute monologue, he said the trade was made to improve the Cowboys’ run defense, citing Clark’s status as a Pro Bowl defensive tackle. Never mind the fact that run defense is not considered Clark’s strength or that Green Bay’s run defense wasn’t very good with him anchoring the line. Jones predictably compared the move to the Walker trade, but there’s no way to spin this as a smart move for a franchise that just gave its quarterback a $240 million contract and its top receiver a $136 million deal in the last year. Dallas was already in the middle of a rebuild when it dealt Walker decades ago. Just a week ago, Jones told Michael Irvin he is “going after [a Super Bowl] this year.” He’ll have to adjust his expectations after Thursday’s trade.
Yet even before the Cowboys traded their best player, I’m not sure anybody outside of the organization had championship expectations for them. In recent years, Cowboys fans had started to lose their patience with Jones, who has been criticized for not spending in free agency and settling for uninspiring (but cost-effective) coaching hires. Swerving so violently in this game of chicken with Parsons and Mulugheta might be the final straw. Receiver CeeDee Lamb publicly criticized Jones’s messiness after Parsons requested his trade in early August, so the feeling might be creeping into the locker room next.
Unlike most hands-off team owners, Jones is essentially the Cowboys’ general manager—a job he’s held since purchasing the team in 1989. That longevity would be impressive if he weren’t his own boss. Are there any other general managers who would survive a 30-year run without a single championship game appearance? How about botching several contract negotiations with star players over the past few years alone? This may be the first time one of Jones’s drawn-out negotiations ended with a star player leaving town, but he has plenty of experience getting taken to the cleaners by them. Prescott has lined his pockets twice in the past five years after Jerry tried to play the long game with him. Stephen Jones, Jerry’s son who helps run the team along with vice president of player personnel Will McClay, has said that not paying Prescott when he was eligible for a new deal in 2019 was the biggest mistake of his career in the Dallas front office. “Probably would have signed Dak the first time around, and it would have been better for everybody,” Jones said in 2021. The Cowboys ultimately gave Prescott a four-year, $160 million deal after he spent two years on the franchise tag. The quarterback initially asked for just over $30 million per season.
A few years later, the Joneses made the same mistake, dragging their feet on another extension for Prescott while multiple quarterbacks signed new deals, driving up Prescott’s market value. Waiting to do a deal with Lamb in 2024 was also costly. They could have gotten him signed a year earlier but waited until after training camp began and ended up costing themselves millions. ESPN’s Bill Barnwell estimates that the Cowboys cost themselves nearly $64 million by waiting to sign those three deals with Prescott and Lamb. Jones also tried to play hardball with Ezekiel Elliott in 2019 and ended up giving him a record-breaking six-year, $90 million contract that did not age well. Jones fancies himself a shrewd negotiator, and maybe he was at one point in his career, but those days are long gone.
Years of questionable roster management have left the Cowboys’ depth chart looking awfully thin going into the 2025 season. Prescott, Lamb, George Pickens, and a solid offensive line should keep the offense in the top half of the statistical leaderboards—if first-year head coach Brian Schottenheimer can dial up the right plays, which is a Texas-sized if—but Dallas will need a huge rebound year from its defense, which finished 28th in expected points added allowed in 2024, if it stands any chance in a competitive NFC East that is home to the Super Bowl champs and last year’s runners-up in the conference. With little to no Pro Bowl–caliber talent left on that side of the ball after the trade, there’s no reason to expect an improvement. But if a few things go wrong on offense—if Prescott regresses further after a down 2024 season that was cut short by an injury, or if Pickens doesn’t fit in the locker room, or if Schottenheimer’s typically conservative play calling bogs down the offense—the Cowboys could be one of the worst teams in the league this season.
I’m not sure Jerry would be patient enough for a rebuild if this season goes badly, but even if he were, truly tearing the team down and starting over might not be possible. Prescott will still have $130 million of dead money left on his deal in 2026. Lamb will have nearly $70 million left on his. Trading either of them for draft capital would be difficult—if not impossible—due to cap logistics. The future draft picks Dallas nabbed from Green Bay will help the team add some young talent to the roster, but if those picks are coming at the end of the round, assuming the Packers are a very good team with Parsons, it’s unlikely Dallas will be finding franchise-changing players with them.
Any way you look at it, it feels like the Cowboys are a few years away from being a few years away. With Jones in his early 80s, the likelihood of him leading his beloved franchise to another Super Bowl before he steps away from the front office is diminishing every day. When Jerry traded his best player back in 1989, it marked the beginning of a new era in Cowboys football. This time around, it feels like the end of one.
