Inside the Cowboys’ decision to trade Micah Parsons

additional reporting by Todd Archer, Rob Demovsky, Dan Graziano and Seth Wickersham

THE PIVOTAL MEETING that led to one of the most shocking NFL trades of the past decade occurred on a pleasant North Texas morning in mid-March, five months and a lifetime of ill feelings ahead of any deal being put to paper.

The agenda for the March 18 one-on-one in Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ office at The Star, the team’s headquarters in Frisco, Texas, between Jones and two-time first-team All-Pro pass rusher Micah Parsons remains in question. A source close to Jones says it was Parsons who asked for the meeting, and that the 82-year-old owner always understood the subject to be Parsons’ contract. After declaring in February 2024 that he wanted to be a Cowboy “for life,” Parsons had been trying to reach an extension with the team, without success.

“Jerry and Micah had met periodically over the last four years to discuss business and leadership issues,” the source said, noting that the then-25-year-old Parsons viewed Jones as a mentor. “Jerry loved having these discussions with Micah. But the meeting in March wasn’t that, despite Micah saying publicly later it was to discuss leadership. Micah told Jerry, ‘I want to come in and discuss where we are,’ meaning a contract extension. So that was Jerry’s expectation.”

A source close to Parsons said this is “absolutely not” true and that Jones called Parsons in for a leadership meeting, only to steer the conversation toward contract talks. The source says Parsons directed Jones to talk details with his agent, David Mulugheta. However the conversation got to a contract extension, both parties acknowledge that it got there.

Over a three-hour meeting, Jones and Parsons discussed numbers, years and guaranteed money. Both sides expected to reset the market for edge rushers, topping the $40 million average per season and $123.5 million guaranteed that Myles Garrett of the Cleveland Browns had received nine days earlier. Parsons’ 52.5 sacks in his career are the fifth most in a player’s first four seasons. Jones said after Parsons left his office at The Star, the owner believed an agreement was done.

Later the same day, Parsons called Cowboys chief operating officer and co-owner Stephen Jones, Jerry’s son, in an attempt to get more money out of the deal, the source told ESPN.

“[Parsons] called Stephen and asked can we do this, can we change the numbers and up the guarantee,” the source said. “He started negotiating. He asked for several different elements and increases. This became a negotiation that Micah was in charge of.”

Stephen Jones consulted with his father, and Jerry agreed to the sweetened terms. The Cowboys believed they had a deal in place with Parsons and would continue to insist that he had agreed to it. Though the exact terms aren’t known, Cowboys sources insist they offered more guaranteed money than the $136 million Parsons would get from Green Bay, albeit spread across a five-year extension, not the four-year extension the Packers would make.

“It was north of $150 million,” the source said.

The Cowboys had been known to conduct contract talks without players’ agents present — a practice known around the league as “hotboxing.” Dak Prescott’s 2024 deal was one such negotiation, whereby the Joneses and the quarterback discussed Prescott’s place within the organization’s future and Prescott’s agent, Todd France, came in later to negotiate the finer details of a contract. (“I never engaged in numbers,” Prescott said.) The deal was eventually signed the day of Dallas’ first game of the season. If the Cowboys expected this negotiation to follow the same path, Mulugheta was about to confront them with a counterpoint.

Jones would say in August on Michael Irvin’s podcast, “We were going to send [the terms] over to the agent and the agent said don’t bother because we’ve got all that to negotiate.”

To this day, Parsons’ agency has never seen the final details or structure of the deal that Jones said he cut with Parsons in April, per a source close to Parsons. Jones and Mulugheta would never truly negotiate at any point. Dallas would simply say the deal is done; Parsons can have it if he wants it. (Mulugheta declined to comment for this story).

“I’m the one who has to sign the check and Micah is the one who has to agree to it,” Jones said on April 1 at the NFL owners’ spring meeting in Palm Beach, Fla. “That’s the straightest way to get there, is the one who writes the check and the one who is agreeing to it talking.”

The Jones source says he had nothing against Mulugheta, though Jones insisted to reporters in Palm Beach that he didn’t know Mulugheta’s name, adding, “The agent is not a factor here, or something to worry about.” At that point, Jones was dug in because “Micah looked him in his eyes and said we have a deal.” The source relayed a feeling from Jones of, “Oh so that’s how they are going to do it. Micah is going to negotiate with us, we’re going to go up, we’re going to have an agreement, and then the agent says that’s the floor and we’re going to go from there?”

“Jerry was like, ‘Hell no. That’s not the way this is going to work.'”

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WITH THE PARSONS situation seemingly at an impasse, the Cowboys readied themselves for the 2025 NFL draft in late April. Parsons’ future with the team was not an issue stressed by draft pundits or armchair analysts, most of whom had Dallas selecting a wide receiver with the No. 12 pick. The Cowboys would fill a different need by taking guard Tyler Booker, then in early May getting their receiver by making a trade with the Pittsburgh Steelers to obtain mercurial wideout George Pickens.

The benefit of hindsight suggests Dallas’ second-round selection had greater meaning than believed at the time, though a Cowboys source said the Parsons matter did not affect their draft board. Edge rusher Donovan Ezeiruaku, chosen with the No. 44 pick, came off a season in which he led the FBS with 62 quarterback pressures and had 16.5 sacks. Those seeking subtext behind the Ezeiruaku pick mostly noted that edge rushers Dante Fowler Jr. (signed on a one-year deal in March — the Packers were believed by league sources to be runners-up for his services) and Sam Williams were heading into contract years, and that the rookie could help ensure the future. Less meaningful to observers was the fact that Parsons was headed into a contract year too.

Although Jones would later say the team began discussing the idea of a Parsons trade in the spring, Dallas did not explore trade talks involving Parsons before the draft, per a Cowboys team source. For one, the contract negotiations were still fresh and the team harbored hope of Parsons accepting the previously discussed deal. The Cowboys also prefer to do trades postdraft when they believe other teams are less inclined to cling to personnel. The Pickens deal reinforced that philosophy.

But the longer Parsons went without a contract, the less likely he and Mulugheta were to accept the terms Jones believed had been agreed upon in March — the edge rusher market had begun to skyrocket. In the weeks before the Jones/Parsons summit at the Cowboys practice facility, the Las Vegas Raiders’ Maxx Crosby (three years, $106.5 million, $91.5 million guaranteed) and Browns’ Garrett ($40 million per year and $123.5 million guaranteed) had inked new deals. By mid-July, the Steelers’ T.J. Watt would sign a three-year, $123 million extension that established him as the league’s highest-paid nonquarterback on an average salary per year basis.

Sources close to Parsons believed that he, more than three years younger than Garrett and five years younger than Watt, would blow those deals away. And a Cowboys source said the team got indications that it would prefer to “go last” in the pass-rush market, because prices were only rising.

As Jones watched the market spike around him, the Cowboys owner and GM grew increasingly comfortable letting Parsons play on his fifth-year option or trading him.

Balancing the cost of the entire roster was a factor in Dallas’ calculus. Only one team — the Cincinnati Bengals — has three players making at least $30 million per year. If the Cowboys had given Parsons more than $40 million annually, they would have had the league’s highest-paid defender, highest-paid quarterback in Prescott ($60 million per year) and one of the highest-paid wide receivers in CeeDee Lamb ($34 million).

If the Cowboys weren’t paying Parsons, it would make negotiating with in-house stars, most notably guard Tyler Smith and cornerback DaRon Bland, an easier proposition. Smith, a 2022 first-round pick, could get his extension after Year 3 in a way Parsons did not. Bland was signed to a four-year, $92 million extension on Sunday.

“It’s an allocation of money,” Jones said the night the trade was completed. “So, we chose to have numbers of players that we could pay handsomely that would be those caliber of players, not young practice squad players. We’re talking players that can really compete.”

And while Parsons’ presence in the lineup was impossible to replicate — by expected points added per play from 2021 through 2024, the Cowboys were the NFL’s best defense with Parsons on the field and the league’s worst by the same metric when he was not — Dallas also believed there were times when his skills were counterproductive to the winning cause. Parsons ranked 68th among edge rushers in stop rate against the run and 81st in yards per run stop last season, according to the FTN Football Almanac.

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“For Jerry, it came back to we have got to be able to stop the run,” the source close to Jones said. “Micah does not do that. In fact, because we couldn’t stop the run, it made Micah less effective. Then they’re going to run right at him, and that’s not what he does. We could not take care of mission critical.”

Still, the Cowboys were preparing as if Parsons would be in the lineup in 2025. They understood how difficult it would be to trade him, even though a team source said they were unconcerned about the public relations fallout the team would face given his popularity with fans. This was a business and personnel consideration only, and the Joneses’ belief that the price would have to be two first-round picks and an established defensive player was crystallized as the return about a week out from the trade, per a team source.

The last star pass rusher traded on his rookie contract — also right before the start of the season — was Khalil Mack in 2018. The Chicago Bears sent two-first-round picks to the then-Oakland Raiders to acquire him; Mack had 40.5 sacks through four seasons, 12.5 fewer than Parsons over the same time frame. Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst, in his first season in charge at the time, had a comparable offer to the Raiders turned down, an experience that might have helped get the deal for Parsons over the line.

“I think what I learned from [the Mack] experience is you’ve got to be in it early,” Gutekunst said Friday.

Only a week out from the start of the regular season, there simply wouldn’t be many trade suitors willing to pay that freight, especially when they would have to negotiate a market-shattering new contract with Parsons on top of the draft and personnel capital they would be expending.

Meanwhile, Parsons himself had remained around the team, showing up to a crawfish boil and paintball outing during the first two days of the offseason program in April as a stated show of leadership and support for new coach Brian Schottenheimer. In June, Parsons told reporters he would attend training camp, though a hold-in began to emerge as a likely proposition absent a new deal.

“When you go around the league and you see these other teams taking care of their best guys, I seen T.J. [Watt] gotten taken care of. Maxx [Crosby] got taken care of. Myles [Garrett] got taken care of, [and] he’s got two years left on his deal,” Parsons said on July 22, the day after training camp began. “You see a lot of people around the league taken care of, and you wish you had that same type of energy.”

There was tension, but the relationship between Parsons and the Cowboys was bubbling at a low simmer. Almost without warning, it would boil over.

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IN AN ERA when statements from famous athletes are stage-managed within an inch of their lives by player agents and teams of publicists, this gave the appearance of something different.

At 1:16 p.m. CT on Friday, Aug. 1, Parsons transmitted three pages of single-spaced text from his iPhone’s Notes app to X, laying out chapter and verse of his discontent with the Cowboys. He revealed his perspective on the March meeting with Jones, the parameters of the contract agreement that he said he believed were a starting point and the Cowboys thought represented an agreement, and capped it all off with a trade demand.

“Unfortunately I no longer want to be here,” Parsons wrote. “I no longer want to be held to close door negotiations without my agent present. I no longer want shots taken at me for getting injured while laying it on the line for the organization our fans and my teammates. I no longer want narratives created and spread to the media about me. I had purposely stayed quiet in hopes of getting something done.”

The quiet had been interrupted, though it had been Jerry Jones who had broken the silence earlier in camp with an indictment of Parsons’ durability and availability.

“Just because we sign him doesn’t mean we’re going to have him,” Jones said. “He was hurt six games last year [actually four]. Seriously. I remember signing a player for the highest-paid at the position in the league and he got knocked out two-thirds of the year in Dak Prescott. So, there’s a lot of things you can think about, just as the player does, when you’re thinking about committing and guaranteeing money.”

Parsons had missed only one game over his first three seasons in the league.

The “repeated shots” Parsons cited continued when Jones was asked to respond to the “Pay Micah” chants the owner was serenaded with by fans at camp.

“I heard it light, but not compared to how I heard them say, ‘Pay Lamb’ [last year],” Jones said a day later. “That was a faint little sound compared to the way they were hollering last year, ‘Pay Lamb.’ … Whoever’s not in, you can count on a few hollering that. But it was a big loud chant last year on Lamb.”

Stephen Jones would further aggravate Parsons by commenting, “We want to pay Micah too, he’s got to want to be paid.”

Amid the pettiness and hurt feelings, Parsons continued to show up — a source close to Parsons said Mulugheta doesn’t see the value in players getting fined and advised him to be present — albeit while citing back tightness as the reason he wasn’t practicing. Parsons had an MRI on his back in late August that came back clean, according to Schottenheimer, and was cleared by Cowboys doctors to practice.

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He continued to participate in walk-throughs and meetings but also exhibited strange behavior including not wearing his practice jersey, or on another day wearing it around his neck, and coming to practice without shoes. Before the team’s preseason finale against the Falcons, Parsons ate nachos as he walked to the locker room, and most memorably lay on a medical table during the game and appeared to close his eyes. The image went viral.

“[Cowboys pass-rushing legend] Charles Haley would have flipped him off the damn table if he saw that,” a team source said.

Parsons’ behavior during camp rubbed many in the building, including in the locker room, the wrong way, with one team source saying his energy was “deflating.” But a team source noted that Parsons stayed engaged in meetings and conducted his own two-a-days — one lift, one running session per workday. “I believed he was doing everything he could to be ready for Philly (Week 1),” the source said.

This encapsulates the Parsons experience to sources in the building over his four-year tenure. Multiple sources said he wasn’t the most diligent in the weight room or in getting treatment, though others considered him a hard worker who improved his communication skills with coaches and players but whose decision-making was sometimes in question. One example was Parsons’ outspokenness on his podcast, which rankled some teammates. The front office and coaches didn’t have a major problem with it. But teammate Malik Hooker made his issues known publicly last year. As one team source put it, Parsons was known to be critical, sometimes out of passion for the game, but coaches would urge him to consider that “you can’t call guys out who don’t have your ability,” and learning how to lead and “bring others along with you” is crucial. That part was considered a process for him.

Amid the turmoil, there were many in the game who believed a détente would eventually be reached. Multiple team sources believed Parsons was sincere in his stated desire to retire a Cowboy, noting that he recently built a home in the area. “I think he felt he was going to play out his career there,” a source said. Jerry Jones’ own words were another major reason why the matter seemed resolvable.

“Any talk of trading is B.S.,” Jones said on the “Stephen A. Smith Show” on Aug. 22 even as a team president who knows the Cowboys operation well told ESPN that in his discussions with them in August, it was clear that Dallas was prepared to move Parsons.

“Of course Jerry gave a head fake to the media,” a source close to Jones said. “You have to go out and say we are not interested in trading him. If you say you are trading him, you don’t get s—.” Jones would acknowledge to reporters after Parsons was traded that this had been a purposeful tactic.

Amid the drama around the contract and other lesser issues including Parsons’ practice habits among the pain points, the Joneses had seen enough. The Cowboys told the team president that they loved the player, but not the person. They had made up their minds. Now they just needed a trade partner.

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TWO DAYS BEFORE Parsons became a Packer, the pass rusher’s representatives made one last-ditch effort with the Cowboys — in the form of an email. The note from Mulugheta to Jerry and Stephen Jones, as one source who viewed the correspondence recalls, acknowledged that a lot of things had been said in the media, perhaps some miscommunications along the way, but despite all of that, Parsons was still willing to do a deal that would keep him in Dallas. The letter said Parsons’ representatives were willing to come to Dallas, jump on a video call, whatever it took to potentially hammer something out.

Jerry Jones responded to the message, saying the Cowboys were prepping a trade and if Parsons wanted to play in Dallas in 2025, he would have to do so on his fifth-year option. Parsons would become a free agent in 2026, but the team could also use the franchise tag to prevent his departure at that point. Parsons would have to decide his next move if the Cowboys couldn’t trade him, though a source close to him notes that Parsons never threatened to hold out and if healthy, he would have played on the option.

Things accelerated from there. The Packers, given permission to speak to Mulugheta by the Cowboys, made their first formal contract offer to Parsons on Tuesday. Green Bay had parameters of a trade hammered out that matched Dallas’ terms: Two first-round picks and veteran defensive tackle Kenny Clark would go to the Cowboys in exchange for Parsons. Clark, a staple of the Packers defense since entering the league in 2016, was hardly a throw-in. His contract was attractive — Green Bay had already paid him the bulk of his 2025 deal, so the Cowboys would pay him just $2 million this season, and $20 million unguaranteed next season. A two-year, $22 million deal for a high-level player was viewed as a win for a Dallas team that sees the 29-year-old Clark as a multiyear solution, and there would also be no dead money if the Cowboys chose to release him after the season.

“From our perspective, it had to include Kenny Clark,” a source close to Jones said. “The only way it worked for us, we need something that helps us now and helps us in the future.”

That Green Bay — the opponent that had knocked three of the best Cowboys teams of the past 11 years (2014, 2016, 2023) out of the playoffs — was the trade partner was apparently not a deterrent to getting the deal done.

As for Parsons’ new contract, while the Cowboys had been unwilling to deal with Mulugheta, the agent’s communication with the Packers was smooth, according to a source close to Parsons. Past deals for clients Jordan Love and Xavier McKinney offered familiarity between the parties, so hammering out an agreement took some time but was not painful according to the source. Had the deal fallen apart, at least three other teams were interested, and the Cowboys would not have traded Parsons within the division. One team told ESPN it wasn’t interested because it felt the price was too high for a player who might turn out to be a headache. Another believed Dallas wouldn’t trade Parsons until next spring and indicated they might be interested then.

Green Bay knew the deal would be costly and didn’t fight that reality, with a source familiar with negotiations saying the contract was “transparent and fast,” for the most part. The move to a deal gained steam in the hour or so before 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, once Mulugheta had laid out the trade terms and Parsons had signed off. Parsons’ four-year, $188 million deal included $120 million fully guaranteed at signing and $136 million in total guarantees, making him the highest-paid nonquarterback in NFL history.

The Packers have reached the playoffs five times in seven seasons under Gutekunst but have not made a Super Bowl during that time. Less than a year after Gutekunst was promoted to GM in 2018, then-team president Mark Murphy fired Mike McCarthy as coach with four games left in that season. In 2019, Murphy hired Matt LaFleur, who took Green Bay to two straight NFC title games, but the team hasn’t been back since. Both Gutekunst and LaFleur are under contract through the 2026 season, and both report to new team president Ed Policy, who took over in July after Murphy retired.

Several Packers sources said Gutekunst thought all along a trade for Parsons was a long shot. He thought that when push came to shove, Jerry Jones would not part ways with a star player in the prime of his career — an idea Gutekunst confirmed Friday in Parsons’ unveiling in Green Bay.

“The chances of these things [blockbuster trades] happening are pretty slim, and I think that was my mindset the whole time, was keep the conversations going because of the uniqueness of the player,” Gutekunst said. “But I don’t think it was really until the last few days that I actually thought, ‘Hey, there’s an opportunity here to close this thing out.'”

When doing their homework on Parsons, Gutekunst and the Packers reached out to people that had worked with, played with or coached Parsons in college and in Dallas.

He wouldn’t name names, but league sources said Gutekunst and McCarthy, who coached the Packers from 2006 to 2018 and Cowboys from 2020 to 2024, maintained a good relationship. Parsons and McCarthy had a solid connection — the edge rusher said in January that Dallas’ decision to part ways with his former coach was “devastating.”

One Packers source said the possibility of landing Parsons started to feel real about a week before the deal, which lines up with Dallas’ timeline of when the Cowboys got serious.

By late afternoon Thursday, LaFleur spoke directly with Parsons about their new partnership, with his assistant coaches coming in and out of LaFleur’s office to high-five and celebrate.

As to which team got the better end of the deal, opinions varied, though the most forceful reaction came in the form of criticism leveled at the polarizing Jerry Jones. Two NFL executives questioned why the Cowboys didn’t get more in return after the trade went down.

“Very bad for Dallas in that they received little compensation in comparison to other superstar prime trades,” a separate NFC executive said. “It’s OK for Green Bay in that their interests are to get beyond the first or second round. I think [Parsons is] a very productive regular season player. I think when teams start running heavy in the playoffs, he becomes less scary.”

In a news conference following the trade, one in which Jerry Jones repeatedly referred to Parsons as “Michael,” the owner justified the move.

“It takes more than one [player to win a championship] and so you do have to allocate your resources, whether it be draft picks or whether it be finances, you have to allocate those resources,” Jones said. “There was no question in our mind that [Micah] could bring us a lot of resources on a trade.”

As Jones took heat for the deal in some corners, others in the league were more conciliatory toward Dallas, especially when noting the increased salary cap flexibility and how it could impact the Cowboys’ negotiations with other core players.

“[Filling a] DT need and two 1s is a good haul, honestly,” an AFC executive said. “Plus, not paying another max contract. That’s a big part of this.”

The Joneses expressed a belief that they would end up with another three to five players out of the deal, in addition to taking care of Smith and Bland.

The end of the Parsons era in Dallas, perhaps fittingly, came in the form of another tweet — this one a farewell. While expressing his appreciation to Cowboys fans and vowing that North Texas would continue to be his offseason home, Parsons acknowledged the fractious negotiations that had reached a tipping point with that much-debated meeting with Jerry Jones.

“I never wanted this chapter to end, but not everything was in my control. My heart has always been here, and it still is. Through it all, I never made any demands,” Parsons said, not acknowledging his trade request. “I never asked for anything more than fairness. I only asked that the person I trust to negotiate my contract be part of the process.”

Parsons made his first appearance in Green Bay the next day, meeting the local media and expressing relief at his situation’s resolution. He dismissed his back problem — revealed on Monday to be an L4/L5 facet joint sprain for which the Cowboys had prescribed a five-day plan of an anti-inflammatory corticosteroid and a physical therapy program — as something that would be a major issue, reinforcing the belief that his contract, not health, was at the core of his limited summer participation. Parsons practiced with the Packers on Monday.

“I think physically, you know, I’m great,” Parsons said. “I think I can contribute a lot. I’m going to team up with the doctors in creating a plan. We already talked about how we can ramp things up and get me into a flow where they feel comfortable and I feel comfortable.”

Parsons will return to Dallas with his new team on Sept. 28, for a Sunday night, Week 4 showdown against the Cowboys. His final appearance at AT&T Stadium as a Cowboy will be remembered for the sight of Parsons splayed across a training table. His next one, wearing a Packers uniform, figures to restore the vision of how Parsons became one of the elite defensive players of his generation in the first place. Parsons himself noted the stakes of what comes next.

“They didn’t give up what they gave up for me to sit on the sidelines.”