Until I watched the Micah Parsons revenge game, I misunderstood its true nature. I had thought that the game was about Micah versus Jerry Jones. About a contract standoff and a trade demand and the kind of “now they tell us story” nuggets that get NFL insiders out of bed in the morning.
Now, I think that the game was more about Micah versus Dak Prescott. About two ex-teammates who couldn’t imagine conceding an otherwise semi-interesting Week 4 contest to each other. There was a fierceness to the game, and also a hysterical sloppiness to it. Both qualities could be enjoyed.
At the end of Dallas Cowboys 40, Green Bay Packers 40, which I watched from the AT&T Stadium press box, I felt happily drained, like I had just sweated out a particularly wild college football game. Like a college football face-off, this game also took four hours.
Many writers—including me—flew in expecting the Cowboys secondary and (notional) pass rushers to play like the group that recently gave the world one last look at “vintage” Russell Wilson. They played exactly like that, before the Packers saved them by giving up 14 points in 32 seconds. Green Bay somehow trailed at halftime.
In the second half, neither team could stop the other, and they traded scores. They did this all the way through the end of overtime, when a would-be winning touchdown was defensed by a Cowboy player’s back and the Packers left all of one second on the clock so that they could kick the tying field goal.
A bunch of reporters raced to the freight elevator so that we could hear Jones sum up the game. Usually, press elevators crackle with jokes about the players and coaches who are about to get recorders shoved in their faces. In this one, nobody said anything. We were as stunned as the players on the field. That was really fun, everyone seemed to be thinking. What the hell just happened?
You don’t have to be a sportswriter to understand that the Micah Parsons revenge game revolved around a single story line. For the better part of a year, Jones was trying to sign Parsons to a big contract—although its bigness was at the heart of the dispute.
Parsons claimed that Jones lured him to his office in March and, without his agent around, started negotiating. Dealmaking of this sort is called “hotboxing.” Hotboxing is one of two essential verbs America learned this year, along with “jawboning.”
Sources close to Jones, meanwhile, denied he’d done anything wrong and said that Parsons had wanted to talk about the contract. Jones was clearly put out that the deal he and Parsons had talked about wasn’t considered the final word. Months later, the argument ended when Jones traded Parsons to the Packers for two first-round draft picks and defensive tackle Kenny Clark. The trade took place on August 28—one month to the day before Parsons returned to Dallas to face his former team.
Fun stuff! But while the media squeezed the Parsons-Jones angle all last week, the Parsons-Prescott part of the story was relatively quiet. Both players took turns saying different versions of: I love my ex-teammate, but I want to win the game—a very specific way of not making news. Parsons allowed that sacking Prescott would be “painful.”
This papered over the fact that Parsons and Prescott were very different people even when they’d shared the Cowboys locker room. Parsons is funny, outspoken; Prescott is careful, leaderly.
Where Prescott was polite to reporters, Parsons made sure they were taken care of. On his podcast, he gave them nearly as much cheap, disposable material as the Cowboys owner often does. Reporters would ask Prescott about things Parsons said, like the time he left Prescott off his quarterback power rankings. Prescott must have loved that question.
This year, Prescott has had to play like a top-five quarterback because the trade obliterated the Cowboys defense. ESPN’s Bill Barnwell has noted that, if you use the metric EPA, the Cowboys defense was the best in the league when Parsons was on the field and one of the worst when he wasn’t.
On Sunday night, you could use the analytic of watching two Packers receivers running wide open next to each other for nearly 50 yards downfield in the first quarter. They got to pick who would catch the ball.
The Cowboys offense, on the other hand, came out determined to avoid Parsons. They rolled Prescott away from Parsons and steered running plays toward him. Earlier in the week, Jones called these schemes “antidotes,” as if he were running a drug company that was racing against the clock to create a vaccine.
Dak Prescott passes as Micah Parsons pursues him during the first quarter of the Packers-Cowboys game
This strategy was going to work for only so long. On the Cowboys’ second drive, Parsons got around offensive tackle Tyler Guyton. You could hear the whole stadium gasp just because he got close to Prescott—although Prescott got the ball out before he could be sacked.
The whole game was like that: a quarterback against a defensive end who lurked at the edge of a frame. Before the half, Parsons got inside guard Tyler Smith—who recently got paid with money the Cowboys might have otherwise given Parsons—and within a step of Prescott. Prescott threw the ball to George Pickens into double coverage, setting up the Cowboys’ first touchdown.
All night, Parsons seemed to be a step or two away from a sack. On Prescott’s last touchdown pass, you could see the QB letting his follow-through carry him forward. He was avoiding Parsons, who was charging from Prescott’s right. In the third quarter, Parsons was in the medical tent when the Cowboys got close to the end zone. After they scored, Parsons slumped on the bench as if to say, I could have done something.
Parsons and Prescott really met just one time all night. In overtime, the Cowboys had the ball at the 5-yard line and looked like they were going in for another touchdown. As Prescott dropped back, Parsons shed a block from a tight end and came charging across the field. That was his signature move in Dallas: the horizontal sprint parallel to the line of scrimmage. Prescott went from having a shot at running into the end zone to being pulled down from behind.
On the stat sheet, Parsons got credit for a sack … for 0 yards. In a tie, it seemed perfect.
After the game, Jones emerged from the Cowboys locker room into a crowd of reporters. I found myself buried in the scrum behind him, staring at the sweat glistening on his brow and a scab on his lower lip and shoulders that looked mysteriously large under his blue suit jacket.
“OK, we’re not going to stay long here,” Jones told the crowd. Every reporter must have enjoyed a silent laugh hearing that. Jones never stops talking.
Jones told us that this game was Prescott’s best ever. He referred to Parsons as “Marco”—a kind of sequel to the post-trade press conference, when he called Parsons “Michael.” Then Jones repeated one of his reasons for sending Parsons to Green Bay: “Dak was indispensable in mind … and Micah wasn’t.”
Jones had worked all week to make himself Micah/Marco/Michael’s chief antagonist, going where Parsons and Prescott hadn’t dared. On one of his weekly radio hits, Jones said of Parsons: “While he does make great plays, there is also a way of playing against Micah. As we know, because we didn’t exactly win the Super Bowl during those years.”
Jones has never won a Super Bowl with any player on his current roster. But zinging Parsons put the owner back at the center of the story.
“Some plays, it looks beautiful,” Jones said of Parsons. “But then other plays, especially running plays, you can wish you’d had a different”—he paused as if searching for the right word—“formation.”
The Parsons trade has been a strange, disorienting event for Cowboys fans. On Sunday night, AT&T Stadium was full of Packers fans in green Parsons jerseys, which look as unreal as the photoshopped jerseys Adam Schefter puts on Twitter when announcing a trade.
Few Cowboys fans regarded losing Micah as a Luka Doncic–level disaster, but rather as one of the near-daily reminders that Jones was the only important person in the front office. And that the guy who usually throws money at big stars—after letting other teams set the market—could just decide to dump a generational pass rusher.
Dallas sports fans are at the mercy of Jones’s words. Bobby Belt, a Cowboys insider on the Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan, told me that he and his cohosts came to Jones’s radio segment last week with 19 questions. As Jones rambled, they held up fingers so that they would know which question to ask next. “You got to really think about how you’re going to ask something because it will change the answer completely,” said Belt.
In most of the NFL world, Jones is the singular villain in this affair. Before Sunday’s game, Belt made a point that I hadn’t thought of. “I don’t think anybody was pro-Jerry from this trade,” Belt said of Dallas fans. “But they definitely just thought there were two bad guys.”
Jerry Jones talks to broadcasters before the game against the Packers
Part of this came from Dallas fans having long since accepted and priced in Jones’s villainy. Part of it came from the oppo research that ran in stories like this one on ESPN, which ticked off some of the organization’s gripes against Parsons. He lay on a training table during a preseason game. He didn’t wear a jersey during a walk-through.
In the days following the trade, people argued that Jones cared more about getting attention than winning games. After watching Jones star in the Netflix documentary America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, about 30-year-old Super Bowls, venturing that opinion didn’t seem like going out on a limb.
What Jones seems to like just as much as attention, though, is the idea that he has agency. “Parsons signs record-breaking deal” is a headline that reduces Jones to another rich-guy owner. Trading Parsons in a fit of pique is something general managers get to do. “I feel good, personally, about anything that has ever involved me with Micah Parsons,” Jones said after the game. “I’m at peace with that.”
At the press conference after the trade, Jones had teased that he might trade the picks he got from Green Bay for players who could help the Cowboys win right now. This week, when asked on The Fan about that possibility, Jones admitted that he entertained such ideas while meditating or taking a shower. He continued: “That’s constantly with me on the hunt for Red October—is the best way to use these picks.”
After concluding his media scrum Sunday night, Jones set off through the corridors of the stadium while still fielding questions from reporters who had tagged along. He finally stopped talking when he stepped into an elevator. The Cowboys had tied the Packers. Jones was happy or, at least, not humiliated. He was off to hunt for Red October.
A final note: I was in the building in 2017 when the Cowboys lost to the Packers in the playoffs on an Aaron Rodgers frozen rope throw to Jared Cook. I went with my uncle Rod. Rod was my Cowboys guy. I spent 40-plus years talking to him about every subtlety of Cowboys football, every draft pick and Jerryism.
After that playoff game, we sat in the cab of his truck in complete silence. We eventually merged from an access road onto Interstate 30, and I said, “You know, after a few years of being pissed off, we’ll realize we saw one of the great plays in recent playoff history.” He didn’t say a word. Not one all the way home. I understood.
Rod died this summer. I thought of that game as I navigated the same roads outside the stadium on Sunday. The silence was deafening.
