The meatballs on the Bears socials all have been pounding the table for us to trade for Parsons for the last couple weeks. Now that he’s going to the rival Packers, those same people are screaming in rage and calling for Poles head.
I was opposed to it (and the same argument with Hendrickson) from the get go and I’m not actually worried about him on Green Bay. Parsons is a very good player, but at the end of the day he’s not that productive. While Sacks and Pressures aren’t the only important sacks, he hasn’t been a league leader in either category in his career. He commands a lot of double teams and defintely impacts the offense in lots of ways, but I have never viewed him as a game wrecker.
The Bears made a trade for Sweat and paid him a bunch of money and it hasn’t really transformed the defense. He’s an important contributor, but he hasn’t elevated us to title contenders. Parsons is obviously a much better player, but the price difference - both trade capital and salary cap - is bigger than the impact difference.
I’m sure Parsons will have a few huge games against the Bears and win them games, also against the Lions and Vikes too, but losing those draft picks and paying him QB money is going to hurt a lot. With Love not being on a rookie deal, it’s not like they have any surplus cap space to play with. And Parsons is a guy who the Cowboys have always used as a chess piece, moving him all over the formation and rushing him from different spots. He’s not a guy you slot in at the RDE spot and ask him to rush and contain. This is going to take time for the Packers to figure out how to use him and I’m not sure Haffley is the best guy to figure that out with no prep time in camp.
We’ll see. Parsons is young so that makes this a defensible trade. But it will be interesting to see how comfortable Parsons is living and playing in Green Bay for the next 4 years.
"Parsons missed four games last season — the first absences of his NFL career due to injury — but still recorded at least 70 pressures for the fourth consecutive year. His 20.2% pass-rush win rate trailed only Myles Garrett.
Since entering the league, Parsons has been nearly unblockable, and he has earned a PFF pass-rush grade of 91.6 or higher in each of his four seasons."
PFF Edge Defender Rankings: Top 32 ahead of the 2025 NFL season
I don’t know if he is a bad guy. I haven’t heard he is a bad guy. Forcing a player to play out the last year of his contract on a team he doesn’t want to play on makes him a bad guy to have on the team not a bad person. He’s a team leader. It’s never good to have a disgruntled team leader. All team leaders should be gruntled.
Better to get two number ones now rather than watch him leave and get nothing.
In a vacuum without any context, this might be true.
BUT
Parsons wanted to stay. As long as he got a deal. A deal that nearly every other team would have been able to figure out and make without a quarter of the drama. And without trying to cut his agent out of the negotiations. It wasn’t even until Jones started faffing about that Parsons asked for a trade.
Also, he’s not locker room poison. He showed up to camp. He showed up to pre-season games (albeit not playing in them). And his Dallas teammates are all reportedly supporting his side of the story and like playing with him.
Finally, it’s not the trade Dallas could have gotten. If they were going to trade him anyway, they could have gotten much more value if they did not wait until a few days before the season started. That’s not a “good” trade. That’s a “best we could do under our SELF-imposed constraints” trade.
Maybe I’m getting wrong information. The numbers I saw were that Dallas offered him more money than he is getting on a contract that is one year longer. That’s not a bad deal. He decided to go for less money but more upfront money. Also not a bad deal. If he really wanted to stay with Dallas they were offering him a good deal that he decided not to take.
And I lay this entirely on Jerry Jones. When you have an owner who is also the GM, and, effectively, the director of player personnel (though his son Stephen technically holds that title), and has held those roles for 36 years, you get a decision-making team of one, who appears to believe that he can do no wrong.
He may have been good at the GM role back in the '90s, but that’s a generation ago now, and any other team would have long ago fired a GM who has only produced four playoff wins – and no Super Bowl appearances – in the past 25 seasons. Jones also has a pattern of falling in love with certain guys (e.g., Jason Garrett, Dak Prescott), sticking with them, and paying them a lot, even when their performance isn’t at the high level which Jones himself professes is the Cowboy Way.
As a Packer fan, I’m thrilled that they now have Parsons, even though the cost to get him was high. Does he make the team better? Definitely. Does it make them Super Bowl favorites? I have no idea; it’s a long season, and they are still one of the youngest teams in the league.
From what I’ve read, there was no official offer. Just the “handshake deal” Jones tried to make where Parsons would play out his 5th year contract option on the original terms and then a 5 year, $202 million offer for years 6-10. So, averaging $41 million a year but only after playing for half that average amount next season (!), and also no details on how much of that was guaranteed.
His deal with Green Bay is 4 years for $188M, $136 guaranteed. So, assuming the average with Dallas (not a safe bet, but there were no details), that’s ~$140M for the next 4 seasons, not all of it guaranteed (and given their other big contracts, I bet they would have minimized the guarantees and backloaded it with more money in the later years). As it would have been an NFL contract, that’s by no means a better deal in any real sense. And that’s before getting to the problem of trying to cut his agent out of the negotiations.
Parsons’ contract is effectively an extension that keeps him on the Packers through the 2029 season, per Spotrac. With the salary/cap explosion, it definitely looks like a three-year deal, when Green Bay can get out of the contract for about $30m in dead cap, otherwise taking cap hits of $60m+ the last two years. Definitely a contract designed to be extended later, or not. The salary cap is going up by an average of $24m a year since the COVID regression, though the jury’s still out on how the NFL Network deal will affect things. Spotrac predicts it will be about 17% of the cap at that point. Bosa and Garrett will both be pretty close to that range, as well.
It’s a lot of money, but if Parsons can follow in the footsteps of Reggie White and Charles Woodson, it could be special. At the very least, it shows that Gutekunst is serious about doing what it takes to win. Since there’s virtually no other reason for a young man to choose Green Bay over warmer and more metropolitan locations, it could prove to be a boon later on.
There’s a lot of could, and maybe, and optimism throughout that entire thing, so here’s a last bit to end it on: Brad Holmes has cried at least once since the news broke, thinking about what he’s going to have to pay Hutchinson.
Sure, but my point is that whatever the headline number Dallas was purportedly tossing around, it was misleading. It wasn’t the sort of contract extension we see these days. It was “here’s a competitive* extension, but you need to play at below market salary for one more year first”
*And I hate that kind of HR doublespeak where they’re trying to pull one over on you but make it sound like they’re doing you a favor
I’m excited to watch Colts games this year. Since I heard they’re dedicating this year’s games to the late Jim Irsay, I can’t wait to watch the players show up drunk, yell at all the staff around them, and pass out behind the wheel of a car at the 50 yard line while complaining how hard it is to be a rich, white, billionaire nepo baby. Should be fun.
That reminds me of last year being the Giants 100th season. How do the Giants celebrate? By posting their highest ever loss total in a season by going 3-14. Seasons are longer now, but still. Highest loss total in 100 years. Go Giants!