Ultimately, we need to remind ourselves again and again that a tie between the Cowboys and Packers on Sunday night—a tie!—did not in any meaningful way change the course of Jerry Jones’s life. The Cowboys’ owner showed up for the part of the contest that mattered to him: a real hardball interview with the network he partially has in a headlock as an NFL owner dangling television rights, featuring the coach that he used to pay millions of dollars asking questions. A regular Geraldo Rivera vs. Charles Manson performance if I’ve ever seen one.
His play-acting in the owners’ box—a truly Vince McMahon–like series of head shaking and hand flailing and clapping and waving—was the capper on a night in which no one meaningfully challenged the idea that he let one of the NFL’s great players, Micah Parsons, leave not because he is some renegade robber baron, but because of a series of devastating financial decisions he made with his own personal play team that left him uninterested in paying a talented edge rusher.
All of that said, there is sadly a swath of American society that routinely subscribes to Jones’s brand of simplistic Southern voodoo and dizzying spin. Jones described the trade like some sort of business deal and framed it as a numbers advantage. And, by golly, had the Packers lost a game in which Parsons did not have a sack, I’m afraid there would be people out there who would believe him. I’m still afraid, honestly, after hearing an uncomfortable amount of applause for a game in which neither team won.
While it’s true that Parsons was neutralized amid a frantic, bizarre and almost psychedelic 40–40 tie on Sunday Night Football in which the Packers squandered a chance for a walk-off touchdown with bizarre clock management and a refusal to take the opening kickoff in overtime (the second-highest scoring tie in NFL history, if you care about that sort of thing), it was not without immense thought on the part of Dallas (and even then, Parsons made an incredible cross-field effort play to stop Prescott from running for a touchdown). Whenever he pressured the A-gap, for example, the Cowboys had to move up their running back like a punt protector. When Dallas was trying to defend Green Bay on the eventual game-tying field goal at the end of regulation, the team had to, at times, experiment with the idea of sending extra rushers to compensate for the loss of—you know—the best singular pass rusher in the NFL.
But I kept coming back to the thesis of Jones’s Parson trade to begin with—that Dallas was not winning Super Bowls with Parsons, so why not get extra players to help them do so without him. And I wonder how that’ll play now that the team is sitting at 1-2-1, and given the manner in which it achieved that record. The Cowboys nearly beat the still undefeated Eagles in the season opener. They almost beat the Packers on Sunday night into early Monday morning. They outlasted the not-as-bad-as-we-thought Giants in an epic shootout, showing the ability to contain a pass rush that absolutely hog-tied Justin Herbert earlier Sunday afternoon. Every week, Dallas is showing a competitive spirit despite being decidedly middle of the road—or worse—when it comes to pressure rate. Or, arriving at this game dead last in opposing QBR, both of which are directly tied to the loss of Parsons.
Again, it’s so much less about what occurred on the field Sunday than what should have been.
Dak Prescott is playing lights out and George Pickens, sans CeeDee Lamb, showed that when he’s in rhythm and not forced to run complementary routes for another wideout, can be an elite, top-grade weapon.
All this sounds, to me, like a team that is probably one good player away from being 3–1. And, you know, not all that far off from technically contending for a Super Bowl amid a season of prevalent quarterback injuries and unseen slow starts from other potential contenders.
Jones’s “plan” hinges on the Cowboys still being successful with Prescott and Lamb in their primes. Prescott is 32 and looks a decade younger, especially on Sunday during that mind-bending throw to Jalen Tolbert, but after reaching an age that begins with a three, the quarterback lifespan is unknown. The time to win with Prescott, like Patrick Mahomes or Matthew Stafford or Aaron Rodgers or Baker Mayfield or Jared Goff, is immediately. There is no tomorrow. There is no growth projection. It’s time to take every good season that is free of injury or fatigue or cynicism you have and be thankful for it. This is especially true when you have top-five players at other positions concurrently.
Imagine for one moment if Jones would have actually gone through a coaching search and competed like an owner who believed he could win the Super Bowl. If Jones would have attacked this roster financially over the past two seasons like an owner who believed he could win the Super Bowl. Imagine if Jones had the kind of faith in his current players that he promises to have in those same players a year from now when this plan will supposedly take shape.
You’d have exactly what Jones is off searching for somewhere else. He’ll get to it, I’m sure, just as soon as his next interview is finished.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jerry Jones Should Not Get to Feel Good About a Tie Against Micah Parsons.
