GREEN BAY – “I never believe you’re one player away,” Green Bay Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst said after the 2020 trade deadline came and went without adding a player that might have pushed the team over the finish line.
He’s probably right, unless that one player could be the modern version of the Packers signing Reggie White.
The Packers are interested in trading for Dallas Cowboys star Micah Parsons. Perhaps very interested in trading for Parsons. Their purported interest in one player or another has been used by teams and agents for leverage countless times over years. The feeling around the league is this time is different.
The Packers, who haven’t won the Super Bowl since 2010 and haven’t won the NFC North since 2021, believe Parsons can do for the 2025 Packers what Charles Woodson and White did for the franchise’s past two Super Bowl-winning teams.
Parsons isn’t some second-tier receiver who could have contributed at past trade deadlines. He’s not like Aaron Banks and Nate Hobbs, who were signed to big-money contracts in free agency this offseason.
Parsons is one of the top players in the NFL. He is a young, in-his-prime player who is on a Hall of Fame trajectory.
“Having a player of Reggie’s stature on a team with so much history and tradition was a great marriage,” Wolf said after White was selected for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006. Wolf’s message when he recruited White was “Reggie, you’re already a great football player. If you come to Green Bay, you’ll be a legend.”
Parsons is a great football player. The 12th pick of the 2021 draft has 52.5 sacks in his career. He is the second player in NFL history with at least 12 sacks in each of his first four seasons. White, coincidentally, is the other. He was first-team All-Pro in 2021 and 2022, second-team All-Pro in 2023 and merely a Pro Bowler in 2024, when he missed four games due to injuries.
Green Bay’s interest shows that maybe there’s an exception to that one-player-away philosophy when that one player is on a Hall of Fame trajectory.
“Players make impacts. There’s no doubt,” Gutekunst said on Wednesday. “You win and lose games because of players, right? These are the guys that do it. So, certainly, players make impacts. You’re never one player away, right? I never believed that. But good players make impacts.
“So, any time there’s players of that caliber that you can acquire, you’re trying to. But this is the ultimate team game. I’ve always believed that. Some of the best teams we’ve ever seen didn’t have a ton of stars on it, right? So, it’s really about how those units operate together. So, you can’t win without good players, but they’ve got to work together. It doesn’t matter how many good players you have. If they’re not working together it won’t matter.”
You know what else works together? Pass rush and coverage. It’s something Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley has said repeatedly. The ability to stop premier quarterback-receiver duos is the biggest question mark on the team entering a season in which Jared Goff and Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jayden Daniels and Terry McLaurin, Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb and Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase highlight the first five games of the schedule.
Even without a consistent pass rush and the presence of Jaire Alexander, Hafley assembled a defense that helped the Packers finish 11-6 last season. Green Bay finished fifth in total defense, sixth in points allowed and fourth in takeaways.
Gutekunst likes “the way we’re trending” from a pass-rush perspective because of the impact of new defensive line coach DeMarcus Covington. “The real bullets will start flying here pretty quick but I like our ability and what we have in front of us,” he said.
He liked how the Packers were trending coming out of training camp in 2024, too, only to see the pass rush vanish for large stretches of the season.
Parsons could turn a good defense into an elite defense. While sacks became an official stat in 1982, Pro Football Reference has put together sack data to 1960. Using that, Parsons already would rank 10th in Packers history in sacks. Clay Matthews was a great player for the Packers. He ranks second all-time with 83.5 sacks in 10 seasons. He had only two seasons better than Parsons’ career-worst 12 sacks from last year.
Being interested in making a trade and actually making a trade, of course, are two different things. Especially in this case.
First and foremost, the Cowboys don’t have to make a trade. While owner Jerry Jones has said he would not trade Parsons, a league source told Packers On SI that they are finally entertaining offers despite their public posturing.
Second, just because the Cowboys are at least open to making a trade doesn’t mean they’ll make a deal. Parsons is a great player and the trade would be massive. At the end, what the Cowboys rightfully will demand might be more than teams are willing to pay. For what it’s worth, the source didn’t think Parsons would be traded.
Third, Parsons is going to get a contract worth far in excess of T.J. Watt’s $41 million-per-season extension. While there are ways to maneuver, there’s no getting around the reality that having Jordan Love and Parsons on the same roster would put an incredible amount of stress on the salary cap. Ultimately, adding Parsons would mean the team would be unable to retain some of its core players.
“Every decision affects your football team,” Gutekunst said. “Obviously, there’s so many different factors in it: who the player is, medical, certainly cap-wise. You have to look at everything. Any opportunity to help your football team, you have to look at and discuss as a group, and we do that all the time. It’s almost daily.
“I think every opportunity that’s out there to help your football team, we’ve always taken a look at try to see how it affects us right now, how does it affect us in the future and make the best decision we can. Sometimes we’ve been right, sometimes we’re wrong.”
Trading for Parsons would be a seismic move for the franchise. It would be an all-in gamble on one player making the kind of impact White did three decades ago. A quality veteran player or two would be going to Dallas. Two or three premium draft picks would be going to Dallas, as well. With limited premium draft picks and the financial limitations, Parsons’ presence would drastically impact Gutekunst’s ability to build the roster.
But 26-year-old future Hall of Famers almost never are available. The Packers are a good team. Maybe even a very good team. Parsons would make them a great team. Maybe even a Super Bowl championship team.
The Packers have been also-rans in just about every conversation for high-profile players for years. Perhaps related, they’ve also been also-rans in every Super Bowl race since 2010.
It’s time for that to change.
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