Well, Jerry Jones has done it again – and not in a good way.
The Dallas Cowboys’ owner, president, and general manager has once again waited too long to re-sign one of his key players, and he’s going to pay for it as a result. At the 2025 NFL owners’ meetings in early April, Jones was asked about edge-rushing superstar Micah Parsons, and how to keep him on the team.
Parsons is probably the Cowboys’ best overall player at this point, and 2025 will mark the final season of his rookie contract. Dallas will pay Parsons a fully guaranteed $24m in that final year, will soon look like a bargain – no matter when or where Parsons signs his next deal.
The problem for Jones and his Cowboys is that Jones has waited too long to make the deal, and has cost himself too much money with the delay. As the NFL’s salary cap continues to rise as the result of increasing revenue from broadcast deals, players are getting bigger contracts, and every NFL executive worth his or her salt is well aware of the fact. Jones waited too long with quarterback Dak Prescott, who signed a four-year, $240m extension last September with $231m in total guarantees. Jones waited too long with receiver CeeDee Lamb, who signed a four-year, $136m extension last August with $100m guaranteed.
Between the four-year, $160m contract with $95m guaranteed that Prescott signed in 2021 and his new deal, the market for quarterbacks exploded. Russell Wilson, Kyler Murray, Deshaun Watson, Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, and Trevor Lawrence all agreed got deals with total guarantees of at least $120m.
The interesting difference in the updated Prescott contract was the length of the deal. While most of those quarterback agreements were for five years, Prescott’s was once again for four years, and that was entirely intentional.
In a recent appearance on the Athletes First Podcast, Prescott’s agent Todd France detailed why he wanted the four-year deal for his client, and why the Cowboys were stuck for a long time on a five-year term. Prescott had already played on the franchise tag in 2020, so waiting it out for what his side wanted was not a new idea.
“We get to the deadline where we have to either do a long-term contract, or play on the franchise tag, so another year of uncertainty on a one-year deal,” France said. “And the same aspect of the negotiation is the holdup.
“The Cowboys still want a five-year contract. We still want a four-year contract. And the four-year term is of the utmost importance to us [with] quarterbacks because of the way that the market grows and the salary cap grows and the desire to get back to the market for these guys and maximize their career earnings.”
In the end, after a lot of bluster and wasted time, the Cowboys capitulated. With Parsons, the capitulation may be more severe.
“I don’t view it as urgent at all,” Jones said on 1 April of coming to an agreement with Parsons. “Some say using the basis that the earlier you get something done the cheaper … well, the earlier you get something done, a lot of times, the more mistakes you make. You might want to see a few more cards play, not just with that particular negotiation, but with the whole team.
“I know I’m kind of being a little defensive here, but the idea that the only success is getting a contract done at an early time is incorrect, I’d rather pay more and get it right than if I had to pay less and screw it up.”
Yes, but in this case, the Cowboys could have saved a ton of money by signing Parsons before the market at Parsons’ position exploded. The Cleveland Browns re-signed Myles Garrett, their own edge superstar, to a massive four-year, $160m extension in March with $124m guaranteed. The Browns had to pay the 30-year-old Garrett at the top of the market for his position because Garrett was making all kinds of noises about not even wanting to be a part of the roster any more, given the team’s struggles to be competitive.
Parsons, who will turn 26 next month and is just coming into the prime of his career, will no doubt draw more than this when he eventually agrees a new deal, and use the amount of money Garrett got as leverage – he can reasonably argue he should get more than Garrett considering he is four years younger and not even at his peak yet.
Jones further antagonized the situation with his comments about David Mulugheta, who represents Parsons and is one of the prominent agents in the industry.
“I’m not trying to demean him in any way, but this isn’t about an agent,” Jones said. “The agent doesn’t have one thing to do with what we’re doing when we get on a football field against a team. Micah does, to the degree I’m involved I do. The people that have something to do with what we do going forward relative to our fans and football are me and the player, not the agent.”
Parsons’ response on social media put a finer point on things. “Facts!! David is the best and I will not be doing any deal without [Mulugheta] involved! Like anyone with good sense I hired experts for a reason,” Parsons wrote. “There is no one I trust more when it comes to negotiating contracts than David! There will be no backdoors in this contract negotiation.”
Alienating your best player’s agent is not a great idea. Alienating him when he also represents plenty of other talented players who you may want to sign one day is even worse.
So, that’s where that all stands.
The tragedy of the negotiating farce here is that the Cowboys are one of the best NFL teams at acquiring talents in the draft; it’s only when it’s time to negotiate new contracts that Jones steps all over himself. Dallas’ player evaluation arm is led by Will McClay, the team’s vice-president of player personnel. McClay would be the general manager for a lot of NFL teams given the respect he has garnered in the industry, but when your team’s owner wants to be the general manager as well, you have to settle for the title that’s left on the board.
McClay became the Cowboys’ senior director of pro/college scouting in 2015 after several years as a scout, scouting coordinator, and director of football research for the team, and with McClay in charge, Dallas have outpaced most other NFL teams in terms of adding talent in the draft. Per a recent Pro Football Network study, the Cowboys rank sixth in terms of homegrown talent in the draft – 60.8% of the roster. Conversely, the Cowboys rank 27th in terms of free agency and trades (39.1% of the roster), and that’s where the schism really rears its ugly head.
Dallas don’t spend a lot on free agents, and that’s fine in the abstract when you get it right in the draft as often as McClay and his staff do. But tipping things on one side of the scale worked a lot better in the pre-free agency days that started to fade in the early 1990s, when teams could more easily hold on to their homegrown talent for better or worse – better for the teams, and worse for the players who wished to be paid in line with their talents.
Dipping a toe in the free-agency waters in the modern day while refusing to pay your top-end talent in ways that will allow them to be retained at ideal market value? That’s a dangerous game with no margin for error, and it’s one of several reasons the Cowboys haven’t come anywhere near a Super Bowl for 30 years.
Jones has been pilloried for his insistence on control of his franchise when others would be far more qualified to take the reins. That has shown itself everywhere from the head coaches hired since Jones and Jimmy Johnson fell out over organizational control and the credit that comes with it in 1994, to overall personnel decisions that have mired the team in mediocrity for no good reason beyond Jones’s hubris and need to be the top dog.
But the worst dysfunction may well be Jones’s misunderstanding of how the modern player market works, because over and over, it’s sticking a knife through the heart of one of the NFL’s best evaluation rooms.
And based on Jones’s most recent comments regarding Parsons, there’s no reason to believe that it won’t continue for some time.
