Jerry Jones has not yet brought to a conclusion the latest in his annual series of contract stalemates with high-profile Cowboys players. Micah Parsons remains inactive, a quiet-quitting sort of hold-out, technically due to a back injury but the sort of back injury that will clear up the very moment he and the Cowboys finally put pen to paper. It remains unclear whether Jones has tried, in any serious way, to move things along. In the past Jones's version of working toward an agreement has very often taken the form of giving quotes to reporters in that banjo-ass Arkansas twang, while not otherwise budging in negotiations. With Parsons, the hour is growing late. Dallas played their final preseason game Friday night, in Atlanta, and their regular season kicks off in 11 days, with a primetime Thursday contest against the defending champions. Jones considers this Cowboys team a Super Bowl contender, and Parsons is very certainly their best defensive player.
Jones got into all this last week in an appearance on Michael Irvin's YouTube show. Jones puts the blame for this standoff on Parsons's agent, David Mulugheta. By Jones's retelling, he and Parsons had an agreement, and a good one—the deal "would've made him the highest guaranteed player other than a quarterback in the NFL," according to Jones—until Mulugheta got involved. "When we wanted to send the details to the agent, the agent told us to stick it up our ass. Micah and I talked, and then we were gonna send it over to the agent. And we had our agreements on term, amount, guarantees, everything. We were gonna send it over to the agent, and the agent said, 'Don't bother, because we've got all that to negotiate."
This is a sequence that has already been described pretty well, and very differently, by Parsons. Parsons says Jones called him into a meeting on another matter in March, and then sprang on him a contract discussion, which Parsons naturally took to be informal because the conversation excluded, you know, the person who he'd hired for the express purpose of managing his business affairs. Parsons says he told Jones that Mulugheta would be in touch about contract matters, but that when Mulugheta contacted the Cowboys he was told that "the deal was pretty much already done." The team refused to engage in further negotiations, a stalemate that persisted all the way through the spring and summer, and which now forms the basis for Parsons's trade request. Jones makes no secret of his preference for circumventing agents in contract negotiations, which is probably why he had to lure Parsons with a discussion about "leadership" in order to spring his ambush.
Jones has a particularly funny way of describing this communication breakdown. "It's the mama-daddy deal," Jones told Irvin. "You go in to mama, and she won't do it, and she's the boss. She won't do it. So you run in to daddy, daddy says, 'Do it,' and you go back in and say, 'Mama, daddy says it was alright.' It's the old mama-daddy deal, we've all been there and done that."
What is hysterical about this is that Jones—who lured a player into a solo negotiation precisely because he knew that the player's agent would be tougher to deal with, and then went to the agent after the fact to say that an informal talk with an unprepared party had already given the Cowboys the answer they were after—seems to believe that he is describing the actions of someone other than himself. My own child—cunning, devious, aware of her irresistible charms—has attempted this very routine on me, and while I may never have advised her to stick an ill-gotten reward into any of her orifices this has largely to do with my parental concern for her physical well-being. The mama-daddy deal is indeed infuriating; I can't even imagine how betrayed I would feel if my daughter went on television and accused me of running it on her in order to deprive her of a Fudgsicle she'd negotiated in bad faith. Time-outs would be dispensed.
That is all context for what took place Friday night in Atlanta. Parsons attended the game but was not dressed—he was, in fact, the only Cowboys player on the sideline who did not wear a jersey, per ESPN's Todd Archer. Parsons was spotted munching nachos while strolling around the stadium's tunnels. When an Atlanta fan yelled something to him about coming to play for the Falcons, Parsons used his nacho fingers to make a greasy "call me" hand signal. Later, in the third quarter, Parsons stretched out on a trainer's table and appeared to grab a few minutes of shut-eye.
"Without talking to Micah, I need to figure out what he was doing and why he was doing it," said Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer after the game. This is not a behavior that would be considered especially controversial were it not for Parsons's condition of limbo. Without the soured professional relationship and the subsequent trade demand, probably no one would've written much meaning onto the sight of an inactive player stretching out for a few minutes during a completely meaningless exhibition. But Jerry Jones likes to do things in a particular way, and bad feelings are often a consequence, and as a result we all get to read something like defiance or despair onto Parsons's brief state of repose. As an otherwise disinterested Jones disliker, to me this kicks ass.
Later that night, Parsons tweeted thanks to a reporter who clarified that he'd only spent a "relatively short portion of the evening" on the trainer's table, suggesting that too much has been made of the incident. "I’d never disrespect the guys out there fighting for their lives," said Parsons. Go ahead and write one particular vector of disrespect into the negative space of that declaration. That inference, at least, has been well-earned.
