When you’re competing for a championship, your opponent’s incompetence can be just as valuable as your own tact. That played out for the Green Bay Packers this week as they swooped in and traded for star edge rusher Micah Parsons (handing him a record-breaking four-year, $188 million contract in the process) after Cowboys owner Jerry Jones backed himself into a corner with one of the worst fallouts from contract negotiation that we’ve seen in the modern NFL.
Before we can even take a guess at what the Packers defense will look like following this blockbuster move, a tip of the cap is due to Green Bay’s front office for changing its modus operandi to make this deal happen. When it comes to moving around draft assets, the Packers have historically been one of the franchises that’s best at maximizing their picks. When players are involved in a Packers trade, they're usually on an expiring contract and are being sent away from Green Bay in exchange for more draft capital. And Green Bay never trades away first-round picks unless it's bound to get some back. Making this move for Parsons by trading away two first-round picks and Kenny Clark breaks the Packers' long-held pattern. This was out of character (in maybe the best way), and it now catapults Green Bay from the football nerd’s favorite NFC squad to a consensus contender.
On the field, this Packers defense finally has the chess piece it's been searching for: a player who doesn’t need any help from the defensive coordinator to strike fear into the hearts of opposing quarterbacks. Last year’s Green Bay defense recorded a lot of sacks (45), but its 35 percent pressure rate ranked just 13th—and eighth among teams that made the postseason. If you remove blitzes, that rate dips to 33 percent, which was also around the middle of the pack last year. To have produced that many sacks without consistently generating pressure speaks to the schematic advantages of defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley, but because of how quickly opponents adapt to new play callers, it would have been tough to make that benchmark again in subsequent years.
More on the Micah Parsons Trade
Parsons's individual dominance changes Hafley’s workload instantly. Parsons has the high-water mark for single-season pressures since he was drafted four years ago: 103 in 2023. When it comes to pressures within 2.5 seconds of the snap (the most valuable kind for any one player), Parsons has two of the top three marks over the past four years: 44 in 2023 and 34 in 2022. When Parsons is healthy and dialed in, Cleveland’s Myles Garrett might be the only defensive player who is as impactful on a snap-to-snap basis, even if other edge rushers have more gaudy sack numbers. There’s a massive gulf between Parsons and the next-closest Green Bay edge rushers in single-season pressures (Rashan Gary with 81 in 2021) and quick pressures (Clark with 13 in 2023).
Parsons’s singular excellence is a rising tide that lifts his teammates, too—drawing attention away from other defenders and creating opportunities for them. Of the 128 NFL pass rush units since 2021, Dallas owns the top two single-season pressure rates, with 45 percent in 2023 and 43 percent in 2022. Those rankings hold even when you remove blitzes, and the 2023 Cowboys have the highest rate of quick pressures among those units. Parsons’s presence helped extend the utility of former teammates DeMarcus Lawrence and Osa Odighizuwa, and lining him up alongside Gary, Lukas Van Ness, and Green Bay’s defensive interior can help the young line establish a new hierarchy in the pass rushing pecking order.
And Parsons isn’t just wildly productive—his athleticism makes you want to buy into every overused turn of phrase you’ve heard about an NFL player. He’s a legitimate superhuman on the field, clocking a 4.39-second 40-yard dash time coming out of college and transitioning from hybrid linebacker to a full-time edge rusher once he got into the league. His first step was made for a Sports Science segment from the late John Brenkus. There are times when he seems to teleport, going from being blocked to throwing ball carriers down in the backfield.
He’s also grown as a run defender as he’s learned more about how to play the position. He’ll never have the raw stopping power of his larger peers like Garrett or Nick Bosa, but he’s an effective disrupter who can slash into the backfield to create havoc—which is enough to keep teams from intentionally attacking him. At Dallas’s post-trade press conference on Thursday night, Jones insinuated that trading Parsons was the best path for Dallas to improve its run defense, but his 45 tackles for loss over the past four years outpace those of more reputable run defenders like Khalil Mack, Alex Highsmith, Montez Sweat, and Jadeveon Clowney. Jones’s logic that trading Parsons will positively contribute to the run defense doesn’t hold up when you look at his on/off splits—and the cost to the team’s pass rush could be crushing.
The data confirms what everyone knew from the moment news broke: The Packers took a major leap forward in this deal. If the Eagles and Lions were the class of the NFC coming into the week, Green Bay is now also in that tier. Packers fans were hoping that quarterback Jordan Love would play at an elite level this season or that one of his young receivers would take a step toward stardom, pushing Green Bay into contention in 2025 and beyond. Parsons alleviates that pressure and gives the team a margin for error that it didn’t have last year—Green Bay lost all five of its regular-season games against Philadelphia, Detroit, and Minnesota by a combined 22 points. Having an elite player that offenses have to scheme around is impactful on its own and is only made more valuable when you consider that any Parsons sack could be the one that swings the flow of the game.
Green Bay hasn’t been opposed to acquiring proven defensive veterans in the past, but it has never spent the combination of guaranteed cash (reportedly $120 million) and draft capital it took to acquire Parsons on one player. Edge rusher Za’Darius Smith wasn’t this good, Julius Peppers and Charles Woodson were approaching the end of their respective careers, and Reggie White was nearly a decade into his time in the NFL before he got to Green Bay. Making this move isn’t just a change to the present-day trajectory of the Packers; it may be a signal that the team’s investment in the local community is generating real revenue for the team and that new CEO Ed Policy wants to use that revenue to lead this franchise in a new direction.
Before White left Philadelphia to join the Packers in 1993, then–Green Bay head coach Mike Holmgren left him a half-joking voicemail saying, “Reggie, this is God. Come to Green Bay.” Just over two decades later, the greatest football miracle of all has landed on the Packers’ doorstep: a potential Hall of Fame talent who’ll play his best years at Lambeau Field.
