Exactly one month after the Dallas Cowboys traded star pass rusher Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers, Parsons will walk through the doors of AT&T Stadium as a visitor. Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott said that, for him, closure on the saga between Parsons and the Cowboys “happened when the trade happened.”Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones agrees with his quarterback.“Well, candidly, if closure were an issue, I should have had that discussion with the mirror before I made the trade, or as I was making the trade,” Jones said on his weekly Friday appearance on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. “Dak’s absolutely right. That’s when all of the drama was gone, when you decided to make the trade. Of course, I was very aware that this game would be coming up this Sunday.”The Cowboys will have their hands full with the Packers’ defensive front, especially since they will be without starting center Cooper Beebe and starting right guard Tyler Booker. Jones acknowledged Parsons’ abilities make him special, but also expressed confidence in the Cowboys’ ability to compete against him.
“Let’s make no mistake about it, Micah is special, and we all know he is,” Jones said. “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. 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.“Bottom line is, when I look at playing him, I think of trying to have him as an advantage when we were playing the other teams over the last four years. Some plays, it looks beautiful, but then other plays, especially running plays, you can wish you had a different formation.”Harping on the run defense has been a common angle raised by Jones and the Cowboys’ front office in the aftermath of the trade that brought defensive tackle Kenny Clark from Green Bay to Dallas, as well as two future first-round selections. So far this season, the Cowboys are 17th in the league, giving up 109.7 yards per game. The Packers have the third-best run defense, giving up 64.3 yards per game.Over the course of Parsons’ four years in Dallas, the Cowboys gave up 122.9 yards per game on the ground, which ranked 23rd in the league during that span.Parsons is bound to have an impact on Sunday, evident by Jones bristling at the notion that Parsons could be taken out of the game.“You can’t take Micah out of a game,” Jones said. “That’s ridiculous… 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. But being trite, we lost games with Micah, and that is a trite statement, but we did.”The saga between Parsons and Jones spanned the entirety of the past offseason, with many things said between the two sides in public. Jones doesn’t believe there was anything that crossed the line into being disrespectful.“Not at all,” Jones said when asked if anything disrespectful occurred over the course of the negotiating process. “If he thinks there was, to him, but I didn’t get that feeling in any way during any of this deliberation.”(Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images)
