Micah Parsons contract situation: Cowboys and star pass rusher ‘close enough’ to get a new deal done

FRISCO, Texas — All-Pro edge rusher Micah Parsons and the Dallas Cowboys are “close enough” on his second NFL contract following his rookie deal, in the words of Jerry Jones.

“I know about the years, and I know about the guarantees,” Jerry Jones said following the Cowboys’ pre-draft press conference on Tuesday. “I know about those kinds of things, and really it’s close enough to ….work on a number. I mean, I’m comfortable with it. I don’t need to adjust.”

That means the Cowboys owner and general manager and his son Stephen, Dallas’ COO and EVP, are into the nitty gritty of the numbers regarding Parsons’ per-year salary. However, the two sides remain not close enough in that department with the younger Jones indicating a desire to re-sign Parsons, who is the only player to have at least 12 sacks in each of his first four seasons in the NFL. That being said, there’s still a ways to go to get to the right number. 

“You look around the league at most of these players who are getting these very top contracts, it does take time ultimately to get there, and believe me, if we could sign Micah to a number we wanted to sign him to, we do it right now,” Stephen Jones said during Dallas’ predraft press conference on Tuesday. “But right now, there’s a difference in what we feel is the right number, and what he feels like is the right number.”  

Parsons is currently playing nice with the Cowboys by showing up to the team’s voluntary workouts that have begun under first-year head coach Brian Schottenheimer, and he even showed up to Tyron Smith‘s retirement press conference last week. That’s because both sides possess an understanding that a deal will eventually get done, just like it did for both quarterback Dak Prescott and wide receiver CeeDee Lamb last offseason. Prescott didn’t holdout last offseason before receiving a four-year, $260 million deal hours before kickoff in Week 1 while Lamb did until his four-year, $136 million contract came after the team returned from Oxnard, California. 

“The assumption here is that we’re going to get something done, and so he knows or should know how important his being around here working is to leadership,” Jerry Jones said. “It’s a big deal. It’s the main reason why I’ve kind taken some of the attitude I’ve taken about this thing. Micah just has to be elevated in his leadership and will be. Or it will be a downer when he gets his anticipated contract. It will be a downer if he does not elevate leadership.”

Elevating his leadership could be as simple as being at Dallas’ entire offseason program, which would be a departure from training on his own during that time in the spring. Last year, he showed up exclusively for mandatory minicamp and called missing the voluntary portion his “style.” Even though Parsons is in-person now, that doesn’t necessarily give Jerry Jones faith that a training camp holdout will be avoided come the end of July. 

“Nothing,” Jerry Jones said when asked what gives him confidence that Micah Parsons’ contract negotiations won’t linger into a training camp holdout.   

The why behind Dallas’ approach to long-term contract talks

Jerry Jones then went on to point on All-Pro right guard Zack Martin‘s 2023 training camp holdout before signing him to a restructured, two-year, $36.8 million contract. Jones also lamented not having an extra $8 million in cap room in the 2024 offseason. Stephen Jones also cited the San Francisco 49ers re-signing All-Pro edge rusher Nick Bosa to a five-year, $170 million extension days before the start of the 2023 season and his holdout not affecting them reaching the Super Bowl. 

“Everybody wants to look for reasons [for going 7-10 in 2024], and we’re always critiquing ourselves as to why we didn’t have a good season [in 2024], and I know one of the things that come up other than injuries is the fact that although Dak never missed a practice and he never missed anything that he wasn’t required be at. On the flip side of that is CeeDee did, and so that becomes an issue, but I don’t think it is,” Stephen Jones said. “I think it [holdouts] inherently comes with the territory [of signing stars to big deals].”

Holdouts coming with the territory of signing top dollar player contracts isn’t necessarily true around the NFL when it comes to teams like Dallas’ NFC East rival, the reigning Super Bowl LIX champion Philadelphia Eagles. They have seven players signed to deals that average $20 million or more per year and none involved a holdout. 

Stephen Jones also agreed to the premise of a question asked Tuesday that said agents would prefer their clients to wait for a deal with the belief that the market goes up. He also conceded Dallas has a philosophy of wanting to wait as long as it can before extending players to top of the line deals in order to prevent a whiff by the front office. The problem with that outlook is that it burns the chance of saving cap space on the back end by not getting the deal done after a player’s third season. It’s all calculated risk, but the Jones family’s risk tolerance is admittedly lower than other front offices. 

“A lot of times we want to not do a player a year earlier because we want to make sure. Because you get to choose a handful of guys that are going to make these big, big numbers,” Stephen Jones said. “There’s maybe as much as half a dozen guys max that can really make an inordinate amount of money. You want to make sure that if you’re limited to five or six of these guys that you pick the right five or six in terms of who you choose. At the same time, the representatives want to wait and make sure he gets the optimal amount of money that he can get for the players, so it’s just not perfect.”

Back in 1993 and fresh off a Super Bowl title, the NFL’s eventual all-time leading rusher Emmitt Smith held out and demanded “quarterback money.” His holdout lasted two games into the 1993 season, and the Cowboys lost both of those games. However, the two sides eventually came back together after an 0-2 start that year, and Dallas repeated as Super Bowl champions. 

“That was back literally before the cap, so that was just my back pocket. You just couldn’t do that much and make this thing work. Why? Because I had to count on my back pocket, and I knew what was in there. … So the reason why you delay is because you’re wanting those resources to not go there, you want to go over to where you can have a better team around them. … So this stuff of well we’re waiting, we’re waiting, it’s going to cost you more. … Have you ever thought that you might read more of the tea leaves if you wait a year or two? What if you have a key injury?”

Jerry Jones loves to liken himself to being an option quarterback when it comes to negotiations in both business and life. Ultimately, he’s going to wait as long as possible to cut up field or pitch the metaphorical football in contract talks with his players because it’s worked in the past. It hasn’t worked lately with Dallas failing to reach as far as the conference championship game in each of their last 13 playoff trips, the longest such streak in NFL history. Perhaps things will be different this time, but it very well could be more of the same. Either way, Jones is quite comfortable with the Cowboys living in the ambiguity wrought by his current mindset. 

“Frankly in my life, I have done better because of the tolerance for ambiguity that I have running the quarterback all the way out and deciding whether to pitch or turn it up himself rather than take the first option and hand it off,” Jerry Jones said. “I’ve done better at the end. Have I had a blood letting out there a few times? Yes, I have, but that’s the reason why you do it because you’re trying to reduce the amount of outdo so that you have some left to do it again. … You might be able to get him for less if you put that five-year contract on him. But you also could eat some players you might wish you didn’t put the money on too.”