Whatever else we might have learned from Sunday night's Packers-Cowboys game—and trust us, given that it's only Week 4 it isn't as much as you might think—we can say with some confidence which side is having the best season.
That's NBC. And it's not remotely close.
Not based on quality, mind you. All NFL games across all platforms are broadcast in roughly the same way, by the same technical and emotive standards; the fees for broadcasting are set not so much by ratings but by Robert Klein's law of supply and demand, which is that the league has all the supply, so it can demand whatever T.F. it wants. But individual aesthetic and programming decisions are made in each one, and the principal one in every Cowboys-involved incident is how much Jerry Jones can be inserted into a gamecast. And in that light, last night was an absolute triumph of the form.
The game itself provided all the action it was allowed to provide by rule—70 full minutes of largely defense-free football, particularly in the second half, when each of the last 10 possessions ended in scores and the 51 total points scored during that half and OT would have represented the 20th highest scoring game of the year on their own. Everyone is free to choose their own interpretation of what it all means, since the game ended in a 40-40 tie with more than 900 yards in total offense. There were plenty of big plays, coaching screwups, and general recklessness to make the three hours and 47 minutes fly right by. We learned mostly what we already knew. The Packers are an effervescent but deeply flawed team, often to the point of unseriousness, and their inconsistencies can sometimes spike into the maddening even for those people with no rooting interest. The Cowboys remain the usual ridiculous piefight, and seem utterly untroubled by whatever happens when they don't have the ball.
Sunday night's game bore all that out with oak leaf clusters, just as you thought it might. That is, if you had been permitted to think about the game in any terms other than as the breathlessly cataclysmic showdown between Jones and Micah Parsons. There were some other mammals in shiny (and in Romeo Doubs' case, visually hydrocephalic) hats thrown in as background shots, which was nice.
Parsons, the ex-Cowboy who bested Jones in contract negotiations by being traded, was the most important Packer in that storyline, while Jones was cast as what he has been for more than 35 years—the pre-eminent and often sole representative of the Dallas franchise. The preseason was framed that way, then became more so when Jones pulled a shocking but otherwise extremely Rich 82-Year-Old Guy move of banishing the best toy in the box to someone else’s rec room.
That was the backdrop to last night's game, but also something like the foreground; the pregame show was about Jerry, for instance, all the way down to an interview in what looked like his office by ex-employee Jason Garrett. So little of that conversation was useful that not even the psychos at Pro Football Talk bothered summarizing it, and they live to parse every Jerrygram that he can produce. NBC seemed determined to milk this cow until all that was left was a hide and an ear tag, as though Parsons-Jones was the greatest contract holdout ever, an epic showdown that would permeate through and perhaps define both teams for the end of time.
It didn’t work out that way, because it never does. Parsons made one big play all night, chasing down Dak Prescott to prevent a touchdown on Dallas' last possession and force a field goal that that simplified Green Bay's task on their final try; he also spent time in the brain tent in the third quarter after seeming to hit his back and head on a tackle of Cowboy running back Javonte Williams. The great denouement between the two colossii of the offseason didn't actually reach any conclusion at all, not on the scoreboard and not in terms of bragging rights. It was a story fully inflated at the gas station level, and the hissing you hear now is it losing its steam. This was just not a game for noticing defensive players, on balance, and the shots of Jerry getting clapped on the back by hangers-on in his luxury box are the oldest of hats. Judging by NBC's SuiteCam shots, his son Stephen may actually be older than his father by now.
Ah, but that's where linear thinking fails you. The ultimate game here, at least for NBC, was in flogging this two-horse cart for every moment it could deliver, regardless of what the game provided. That the game wound up providing so much didn't really force much of a deviation from the script. One would have to rewatch the game to count if anyone was shown on screen more than Jerry, including quarterback Dak Prescott. You go ahead if you need to know—four hours was more than enough for the average human.
And those four hours, when combined with the nearly five hours NBC got to scratch its Jerry itch in Week 1 after Cowboys-Eagles was delayed an hour by lightning, means that the network has now gotten nine hours of the Cowboy owner in his natural habitat into two broadcast windows. That is a great result when the goal for the networks is to suck up to the league's most powerful being for favors to be distributed later, and NBC knows that Micah Parsons doesn't get that done.
Since NBC has barely 20 games in its NFL package each year—they’ll have a bit more this year, since it has the Super Bowl, which should if nothing else replace the Jerry content with Bad Bunny—it can use all the Jerry-based goodwill it can get, and they have only one crack at that left this season, December 14 against Minnesota. Now unless the Vikings decide they need to trade for Prescott, it is hard to see how Jerry-centric NBC can make that game; the Cowboys still don't give off the vibe of a team that will play meaningful December football and the Vikings are staring down the barrel of another month of the Carson Wentz QB1 Experience. Defaulting to Jerry stuff is easier than putting a high gloss on that particular turd.
That's why the Peacock is the Peacock. It can and will do what must be done, however that manifests itself; the show is the thing. The Parsons story will run its course as they all do, but the key to Jerry as a character and as an owner lies in trying to figure out how he will replace himself with more of himself. He's already made the whopping trade nobody thought he would and summoned the meteorological powers of Zeus, so whatever comes next ought to come with actual floods and explosions and people running while on fire. A tie is only unsatisfying if you care about outcomes. In the bigger picture, unlike mere stupid old football, Jerry can be counted on to do what must be done for his desired result—time in your face.
