The Dallas Cowboys are no longer America’s Team. There’s a chance they aren’t even Texas’s team.
Three years ago, the Houston Texans had a very similar situation to the one the Cowboys just resolved. Quarterback Deshaun Watson had requested a trade. He had sat out an entire season, with pay. He had more than 20 civil lawsuits pending.
Texans G.M. Nick Caserio worked the situation masterfully, creating a four-team competition between the Saints, Panthers, Falcons, and Browns that allowed Caserio to name his price to each of them before they were allowed to even talk to Watson.
The Cowboys could have done the same thing with linebacker Micah Parsons. But, as they often do, they waited too long to make a decision.
More broadly, the Cowboys all too often seem to lack clear strategic vision. But, hey, that’s what happens when the General Manager never should have been the General Manager in the first place.
Yes, the owner has the ability to give himself any job he wants. And, when Jerry Jones bought the team in 1989, he gave himself Tex Schramm’s job.
Jones had no objective qualifications for Tex Schramm’s job. And here’s the biggest irony about the state of the team, nearly four full decades into Jerry’s run as G.M. While the front office under Jones has done a very good job of drafting and developing talent, they’ve mismanaged the one thing Jerry brought to the table when he bought the team — knowing when and how to do good deals.
They built their team that won three Super Bowls in four years before the salary cap era began. Even since the spending limit was put in place, they’ve bungled big deals. They’ve waited too long to get guys extended. They’ve extended some of the wrong guys.
Most recently, they blew the ideal window to get the most for Parsons.
It’s a simple proposition. If they were going to trade Parsons, they should have made it known in early March that he would be available. Before teams spent their cash and cap allocations for 2025. Before they signed, or re-signed, pass rushers in free agency. Before they drafted young pass rushers.
On Thursday night, Jones admitted that he was thinking about trading Parsons months ago.
“This trade was not just thought about today,” Jones told reporters. “This trade has been going on in our minds and our strategies and being talked about — it’s been going on all spring. It culminated today and it came quick, but that’s the way things go.”
Did they have trade talks before the draft?
“We had them,” Jones said. “But we didn’t have them with anybody else.”
They should have. If they had, they would have gotten more.
Jones could brush that off as pure speculation. It’s more accurate to call it fact. More teams would have had the cap space in March. More teams would have had interest in March. More teams would have come to the table in March.
If Jones had handled it the right way, it would have unfolded as another Deshaun Watson-style competition. While it’s hard to imagine Parsons getting more than the compensation package he received from the Packers, the Cowboys would have gotten more than a 2026 and 2027 first-round pick and a soon-to-be 30-year-old defensive tackle who has made the Pro Bowl three times in nine seasons.
Beyond the volume of picks, the Cowboys would have acquired selections that could have been used in 2025. As explained last week, they could have emerged with someone like Travis Hunter or Abdul Carter. And they could have gotten more than that.
As it stands, they got a player whose prime will soon be ending (if it hasn’t already), a pair of future first-round picks that likely will land late in the round, and the cash and cap space saved by not paying a player who deserved a giant pile of both.
No, the Cowboys will never admit that they made a mistake. At some level, they know. They screwed this one up, in multiple ways. Above all else, they waited too long to make Micah available.
If they’d done it in March, they would have gotten more.
Maybe, in hindsight, they should have hired Nick Caserio to be the G.M. before the Texans did.
