FRISCO, Texas – On Thursday, Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott was asked if Sunday’s game against the Packers would give him closure on the Micah Parsons’ trade that’s been the talk of the town leading up to the Week 4 matchup.
In his mind, the closure happened when the Cowboys made the deal. He said if it would be closure for anyone, you’d have to ask Parsons and Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones. One day later, Jones said he stands in the same boat as Prescott.
“Candidly, if closure were an issue, I should’ve had that discussion with the mirror before I made the trade or as I was making the trade,” Jones said on 105.3 the Fan. “Dak’s absolutely right, that’s when all the drama was gone, when we decided to make the trade.”
Jones knew that this Week 4 prime time matchup was on the horizon when he made the decision to send Parsons to the Packers in exchange for Kenny Clark and two future first round picks.
What he also knew is that Dallas’ offense would have four years of knowledge on Parsons, and that would benefit them in preparation this week.
“Micah is special, and we all know he is, and he can be disruptive. But we have huge amounts of experience with the anecdotes that we’ve seen used on us for the last four years,” Jones said. “While he does make great plays, there is also a way to approach playing against Micah as we know because we didn’t exactly win the Super Bowl during those years.”
One of the biggest reasons Jones and the front office said the Cowboys made the trade was to improve in the run game. In their mind, Parsons could be a liability at times against the run, and it sounds like part of the game plan this week is to run at number one in green and gold.
“When I look at playing him, I think of trying to have him as an advantage when we were playing other teams over the last four years,” Jones said. “And some plays it looks beautiful, but on other plays, especially running plays, you can wish you would’ve had a different formation.”
With all of that in mind, Jones isn’t naïve enough to think that the Cowboys can remove Parsons from the equation entirely. That said, Dallas has seen how other teams have limited him and are aiming to do the same come Sunday night.
“I’m not hoping that. You can’t take Micah out of the game, that’s ridiculous,” Jones said when asked if he wants the Cowboys staff to devise a plan centered around taking Parsons out of the equation. “Not a ridiculous statement, I’m just saying that [the] thought if you had it that you were taking him out of the game, but you can play him.”
“And trust me, he was played by teams against us over the last four years. We saw it all the time. Now whether or not we can accomplish that, that remains to be seen. Being trite, we lost games with Micah. And that’s a trite statement, but we did.”
The entire Parsons-Cowboys saga has been one that’s spanned a few years now, and will likely continue to be talked about in the future comparing how both teams perform post-trade. After Jones told reporters earlier this week that the team would not give Parsons a video tribute, Parsons said there were “a lot of things I can consider disrespectful throughout this process,” but that not getting a video tribute was not one of them.
Jones has long held the perspective that there was nothing personal on his end about the negotiation and reaffirmed that on Friday.
“If he thinks there was, to him, I didn’t get that feeling in any way during any of this deliberation. And it went on for quite a while, as we all know… that just is not the case, that it was meant to be in terms of the sensitivity of it,” Jones said. “I understood that from the very beginning, this was significant to all parties’ concerns, significant to Micah, those feelings are always highly sensitive in that set up.”
All the talk of tributes, grudges and so forth will go off the table on Sunday night at 7:20 as the Cowboys look to get back to .500 with a win over the Packers and Parsons in his homecoming. Not only Is Jones excited for the atmosphere, but he’s excited about what he thinks his team can show.
“I’m so excited about this. I’m so excited, I hope our fans are. Man, don’t think we can’t get ’em. We can get ’em here. Let’s go.” Jones said.
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