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Late last week superstar Dallas Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons requested a trade from the team.
If you haven’t been following this story, the extent to which the Dallas Cowboys have botched this situation has been truly staggering. Negotiating an extension with a player of Parsons’ caliber should be simple. He’s one of the handful of players in the league where a market resetting extension is still a good value. Instead, the Cowboys have dragged their feet and taken negotiations into public.
We have awards for players, coaches, and executives. There are currently no awards for owner performance. If there was a honor for most incompetent owner of the year, (Let’s call it the Woody Johnson Award.) Jerry Jones would have already built up an insurmountable lead for 2025.
The Cowboys
have said they won’t trade Parsons. Time will tell. These ugly contract standoffs frequently get pulled from the precipice when a team realizes it can’t afford to lose a player and finally relents with a big contract offer. Bad feelings can smooth over quickly.
It’s certainly possible that will be the case here. It depends on Dallas coming to its senses. But there are no guarantees.
As a Jets fan, you develop a sixth sense for understanding when an owner is damaging his team in a profound way. It seems like Jerry Jones is going out of his way to make this feud personal with Parsons. That could potentially damage the relationship beyond repair and force Dallas to trade him.
Whenever a big name player enters the market, the same question pops up. Should the Jets be interested?
In the case of Parsons, the answer is easy. All 31 non-Dallas teams in the league should all be interested.
One of the things I frequently discuss here is the need for teams to build through the Draft and develop homegrown talent. There’s a simple reason for that. Players like Parsons almost never become available.
You can find under the radar guys like DJ Reed in free agency.
But when big names become available, there is usually a catch. Many of them are old and declining like Aaron Rodgers, Dalvin Cook, and Tyron Smith. Others come with big injury risks like Mike Williams. Maybe they come with a different risk like Le’Veon Bell, who sat out a full season just before he signed with the Jets. Or there’s somebody like CJ Mosley, a very good player but one who just doesn’t play a position that moves the needle.
The Jets are a cautionary tale in constantly chasing after the shiny object. I just gave you any number of different cautionary tales from transactions made over a five year stretch. These are among the common reasons it’s a bad idea to chase numbers.
In Parsons you have the exception to the rule in the NFL, a truly high impact, transcendent player entering his prime years. Outside of quarterback, there arguably isn’t a player more valuable in the NFL than an elite pass rusher.
I recently took a look at the
Stathead database to try and put Parsons’ first four seasons into context. Since it became a stat, only Reggie White, JJ Watt, Derrick Thomas, and DeMarcus Ware compiled more sacks in their first four NFL seasons than Parsons.
White, Thomas, and Ware are in the Hall of Fame. Watt will be the day he becomes eligible in 2028.
It becomes clear quickly that Parsons is one of the few players in the league worth sacrificing a bunch of high Draft picks to obtain AND offering a market resetting extension.
Moves like this should be judged for their long-term impact. If you make a monumental investment in a player, you want him to be very good for a long time. Nobody can predict the future with 100 percent certainty, but Parsons is a 26 year old who has finished in the top three of Defensive Player of the Year voting in three of his four seasons. There isn’t a better bet to be found anywhere in football.
Even the short term would have massive benefits for the Jets. We all know about the giant question marks on the Jets offense. For this year, the team’s needs might be better fit by a Parsons level talent becoming available at wide receiver. That isn’t very plausible, though. Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson aren’t on the market.
Short of that happening, there’s no better way to help the offense than by lowering the number of points it needs to score to win games. A defense with Parsons and Quinnen Williams getting after the quarterback and Sauce Gardner covering on the back end certainly should keep that number low.
I guess the argument could be made that the Jets would be hurt by trading for Parsons because they would send out first round picks that could be used to pick a quarterback in the NFL Draft.
That is a reasonable concern in theory. In practice, though, I’m not convinced it accurately conveys the risk-reward.
There are three major factors to consider.
- There’s no guarantee the Jets will even pick a quarterback in the first round of the upcoming NFL Draft.
- There’s no guarantee the right quarterback will be there when the Jets pick.
- There are ways to obtain a quarterback other than picking him in the first round.
Would the Jets be better off keeping the pick rather than trading it for Parsons if they were guaranteed to get a Josh Allen/Lamar Jackson quarterback? Sure, but we need to consider how likely that is.
Just go through the list of starting quarterbacks in the NFL. Then ask yourself this question. If I was starting a team, would I choose this quarterback or Micah Parsons?
I came up with 12 quarterbacks I would rather have than Parsons. You can quibble either way over a couple here or there. Still, I think you’re probably going to choose Parsons over more than half the quarterbacks in the league.
Obviously you don’t throw away a lottery ticket that could land a great quarterback for no reason. But is that lottery ticket enough to pass on the chance to add a legendary pass rusher? I’d say no, especially considering how five of the twelve quarterbacks I’d take over Parsons were either drafted by a different team than they currently play for or were picked outside the top 30.
But none of this means the Jets are going to be in the mix to trade for Parsons should Dallas make him available.
Writers come up with all sorts of wild speculative trades like
this one from The Athletic.
Jets trade RB Breece Hall, DE Jermaine Johnson, 2026 second-round pick, 2027 second-rounder and 2028 third-rounder for Parsons
If you can get Parsons to New York without giving up that first round pick, I think almost everybody would sign up for that. Unfortunately a deal like this doesn’t seem terribly realistic.
I’m a big Breece Hall fan, but let’s be honest. He plays a low value position. He’s coming off a bad year, and he’s only signed through this season. His trade value is minimal. Maybe Dallas really likes him and would want him in a deal. Still, his value would be as a throw in. Him being part of a deal wouldn’t make Dallas reduce its Draft pick ask by much.
The same goes for Jermaine Johnson. He has been a good player, but it’s difficult to envision Dallas taking a defensive end coming off an Achilles injury as a centerpiece of a trade. If Dallas wants an established pass rusher, it’s more realistic to think they would ask for Will McDonald.
You’ll find wild trade ideas like this all over the internet. What you won’t find is any actual reporting to suggest the Jets are interested in Parsons.
Frankly, it would surprise me if Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey had much interest in Parsons. This would cut against everything they have done so far. Their first offseason was lacking in splash moves. Of course part of this was due to the restrictions the Jets’ recent salary cap management put on them.
Still, they have been vocal about focusing on player development and building through within. The big money deals over the last few months have gone to homegrown Jets like Sauce Gardner, Garrett Wilson, and Jamien Sherwood. They have also been open about focusing on rebuilding what was a broken culture that saw plenty of big name players with egos but an overall lack of cohesion. This new regime at least in year one seems to want low profile guys who will not draw attention.
Trading for a Parsons would be a complete 180 from this approach. Is Parsons the type of talent that should cause the new regime to make an exception? I would argue he is, but there’s no indication the people in charge are about to budge from their approach.
There’s an irony here for me. For two years I have felt like the Jets might as well have been run by a WFAN caller (or perhaps more accurately, a Twitter fan obsessed with Madden rankings). The Jets recklessly chased every old, past his prime big name under the sun. Now a potentially available big name player makes sense, and there isn’t much to indicate they will have interest.
I like the early Glenn-Mougey approach of focusing on building from within, and I think they can be successful here even bypassing an opportunity to land Micah Parsons. You can always recover from the player you don’t get. That’s a principle that would have served the Jets well to remember the last two years, and it still applies now.
Still, opportunities like this don’t come around every day. If ever there was a player who merited a one-time strategy shift, Parsons is him.
